Author's Notes:

Google Docs Link should you want it.

Special thanks to my editor, EverfreePony, and my main pre-reader and basically-co-author, SnakeEye

New Detrot

I woke up on a comfortable mattress. Nothing like the scratchy, dusty, or rock-hard stuff I’d been sleeping on the past few nights. Well, Stockpile’s mattress hadn’t been terrible, but it wasn’t as comfortable as this. I opened my eyes to almost complete darkness. I could make out a ceiling and a shelf. Where was I? I tried to turn on my back and regretted being alive. My “mattress” moved with me, and the way I moved to stabilise myself sent nails of pain through my entire left side. I felt tears well in my eyes, and that was what it took to make me remember last night.

I turned on my PipBuck light and tried to figure out my surroundings properly. I immediately knew I was in his wagon, but I didn’t know why. The restraints on my hooves were gone, and all that remained of them was slight soreness where they’d dug in. In the corner, I spotted a small magic lamp and turned it on. Trying to find Candy, I looked below the hammock, but she wasn’t anywhere in the small room, and I was worried. I knew we’d killed him, but I had no idea what had happened afterwards. Oh, I hope she’s alright, I mentally pleaded.

Luckily for me, a single white bar stood proud on my EFS, and that left me with at least somewhere to start looking. I gritted my teeth as I got off the hammock and onto the ladder. Once on it, it wasn’t nearly so bad, but every time I had to turn my torso, the pain came back like a hot knife through my chest. At least my headache was mostly gone. Or maybe it was just overshadowed.

I winced as I placed my hooves on the ground. Couldn’t I go two days without some kind of painful injury? Above me, my jumpsuit hung on a wire strung between the two sets of shelves, stained carmine where his blood had landed. My own coat was not in any better state, caked in dried blood from now three different sources. I touched my face—grimacing as the motion twisted my torso—and felt dried blood sticking to my fur and mane. I already had had bits and pieces of that raider’s brain stuck in there. However, the quantity paled in comparison to how much there was now. It was like a layer of mud, glueing most of my mane together.

For the first time, I genuinely felt dirty. I wasn’t mildy sweaty after a short run. My mane wasn’t slightly greasy because I forgot shampoo in my last shower. No. I was covered in dried blood and brains. I also had literal mud in my fur, but that was insignificant in comparison.

I put my muzzle up to my foreleg’s fur and took a sniff. I reeked; the smell of old blood as well as fresh, coupled with rotting sweat nearly made me gag. My body was permanently damaged, and temporarily dirty. It felt so incredibly wrong after a lifetime of cleanliness.

I snapped out of my reverie. Now was not the time to wallow in self-pity about the deplorable state of my body. I opened the door, momentarily blinded by the outside’s light, and found myself face to face with my newly discovered worst enemy: a ladder. The wagon hadn’t moved, and, to my left, Candy had relit the fire and was sitting in front of it, perfectly still, facing away from me. I doubted she even noticed me.

I held back tears once when I walked down the steps, and again when I walked down the slope. Somehow, Candy still hadn’t noticed me. I approached her until I saw her face. She stared vacantly into the fire, eyelids swollen, and huge bags under her eyes. In other words, she looked like my ribs felt. Additionally, her hooves had deep, furless, angry red gashes where her restraints had been. Just how hard had she tugged on her rope? In front of her lay a small notebook with a black cover. “Candy?” I softly called. She blinked and turned to me. I felt tears well up at how pitiful she looked.

“Oh, it’s morning already.” It was almost noon. She turned back to stare into the fire, and I sat down next to her, blinking the tears out of my eyes. From here, I could read the text in the notebook. The first line was the date of the day before yesterday.

Dear Diary,

Tomorrow I will have fun. As you know, I’ve been staying at Stockpile’s inn for the last few days. I’ve mostly been putting off returning to New Detrot; been feeling too wistful. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s my age starting to show. I’m not as old as that pile of bones Stockpile, but I suppose I’m one of the older ponies in the Wasteland now. I digress.

This mare and her filly—or maybe they are sisters, it’s hard to tell just how old either of them is—arrived at the inn today as well. They’re very clearly freshly out of a stable, and they’re in a difficult monetary situation. My first thought was to promise free passage to New Detrot, then convince the griffins there they’d agreed to pay me and were trying to weasel out. Maybe I could have even sold them off as slaves, as a way to settle their debt towards me.

However, when that dusty old scrotum suggested sex work to the mare, her reaction was priceless. Just the thought of having my way with her was heavenly. Prudes are always the most delightful to break.

Even better—this naïve simpleton immediately accepted. For a moment I thought the filly was going to see through my façade, but she kept her filthy muzzle shut. I do love foals that know their place, they are so much easier to deal with. I suppose I could hand her over to Red Eye for free, to get on his good side, and sell the mare for a premium. Strong and beautiful, has the perfect body for slavery.

I shall keep this short, for I am impatient for tomorrow to come. I’m so excited just thinking about how this innocent mare will beg for mercy.

Yours Truly,

Silver Tongue

When I was done, I was shivering. Not with fear or because of the cold, but with burning, passionate hatred that set off an inferno of fury. I was so angry that I regretted that he was already dead. I wanted to make him suffer and beg for mercy like he wanted Candy to. A mental image filled my mind. Him, legs cut off, dangling above the fire, slowly being cooked to death, screaming for release, terror in his eyes. Maybe I could slice open—

Candy interrupted my fantasy. “You know. The hardest thing about this whole situation is realising that he really did deserve to die.” Back to reality, I realised the atrocity of what I’d been thinking about. What is wrong with me? “I… spent half the night crying. I’d just killed a pony. Not some weird pony-shaped creature that had the strength to cave in my skull.” She sighed, and tears started running down her cheeks. “I lied when I said I would do the same as you in your position. Truth is, I understand why you did it, but still disagree…” confessed the pink mare. “I- I always… thought nopony deserved to die. I thought that, if I were abused, I would somehow forgive my rapist,” she mumbled, jaw quivering.

I listened quietly, leaning against her and stroking her mane as gently as I could with my telekinesis. I wanted to use my hooves, but I knew it would cause me pain, and touching anypony with those filthy hooves didn’t sound like a good idea. “A-and even when I did k-k-k-kill him,” she sobbed, “I still regretted it. I hated him and wanted revenge, but killing him still felt wrong. So fucking wrong. But I needed to save you. That too felt wrong. In a way, I was choosing your life over his.”

“But then I found his diary, and now I can truly say I understand how you felt when you killed Uncle Concerto. Silver Tongue was the most vile, sadistic pile of pony shit to ever walk this planet.” How cold her voice turned shocked me to my core, but I agreed with every ounce of hatred.

“I wasn’t the only one. We weren’t his only victims, just the latest. We weren’t even the worst. I’m genuinely glad things worked out as they did, because otherwise I would never have been able to wipe his pathetic life from Equestria. Even if I did get raped, that’s just going to have to be a scar I’ll have to carry from now on.” I desperately wanted to ask what ‘rape’, meant, but I knew now was not the time. “And now, I know for a fact I made the right choice by choosing your life over his. He deserved to die, and you deserve to live.” She gently embraced me, managing not to hurt my rib.

For a long while, we just sat there, basking in each other’s comfort.

Eventually, Candy spoke up again. “We should get going,” she said monotonically. It was very weird to hear her talking in such a flat voice devoid of happiness. It hurt me to hear it. I was once more filled with anger directed at Silver, but that was drained away as she wearily added, “We’ll eat some apples on the way. You should get on the cart, and I’ll pull it. You’re way too hurt to walk a long distance.”

As I settled at the front of the wagon, careful to avoid stressing my chest, wind chilled me, making me sneeze.

My world exploded in pain, and I thought I would lose consciousness again, but I didn’t. How could a single sneeze hurt so much? I didn’t understand.

The rest of the day crawled by in silence, with neither of us feeling motivated enough to break it. It felt like Candy would never be the same; she was permanently damaged, just like I’d physically been broken. It was painful to think that I was the cause. If only I’d spoken up. If only I’d said anything. Then what? She would have just dismissed me as a dumb child. I know damn well adults don’t care about my opinion. No. Candy wasn’t like that. She genuinely cared about me, didn’t she?

I pushed the thought aside for now. I could always ask her about it later. And then what? “Hey so you were beaten up because I thought you wouldn’t listen to me.” No, I couldn’t tell her about my mistake; it would only bring her pain. Admitting blame to myself was hard enough.

Didn’t I say I pushed the thought aside? I guess it’s just hard to get rid of the guilt. This was all my fault, after all. But was it really? Yes, I could have prevented it. But so could have Stockpile. And so could have Candy, and certainly I was not considering blaming her for this. No, blaming myself didn’t make sense. I could have prevented it. But this didn’t mean I had caused this. No, that was Silver Tongue. He and only he was to blame. What I needed to do, and the only thing I could do, was learn from this.

Never again would I let Candy trust a stranger blindly. Though I suppose she wouldn’t trust anypony blindly anytime soon, either. My bigger mistake was assuming she knew better, even though she clearly had not known better. I had known better, and I could have stopped this. She might be an adult, but she isn’t perfect, and my foalish assumption of the opposite had brought her harm. She protected and looked out for me, and I needed to do the same. I would be the sister she needed right now.

I could tell she was tired by the way she walked. She was much slower than normal, and her gait looked unstable and wobbly. “Hey Candy?” She turned to me without stopping her march forward. “I think we should call it a day soon.”

“Why? We’ve only been on the road for a few hours,” she countered. “If you want, you can try to sleep inside. I’ll get us to New Detrot.”

“I’m not that sleepy, but you seem about ready to keel over.” She had stayed up a long time before, and that had led her to making a very poor decision, albeit one that benefited me. I doubted she would have left the stable and joined me outside had she been fully rested. Now, she was already in a bad place mentally, and the sleep deprivation likely did not help at all.

“What do you mean, I’m fine,” she said right before tripping on a rock and landing face-first onto a wooden plank.

I stood up immediately and regretted the motion just as rapidly. “Are you okay? That looked painful,” I asked, wincing.

Defeated, she turned her head to the right, in direction of the plains, and replied, “You know, I think you’re right. I need to sleep, or I’ll get us both killed.” My heart sank. So she was ready to listen. She would have listened if I told her Silver was suspicious. Shut up, brain. There is absolutely no reason to feel this way now. There’s nothing I can do to fix it now, so please shut up! Stop making me feel terrible…

“It’s just…” she continued. “I’m not sure I want to sleep after this. I took a nap earlier, but woke up from a nightmare. At least when I’m awake he can’t hurt me anymore.” She let out a heavy sigh. My ribcage hurt at the thought of sighing like that. Meanwhile, her words wrenched my heart. You poor thing… “But I suppose it won’t help if I hurt myself instead. Let’s stop for the day.”

The area around the tracks was much flatter this time, so we took the opportunity to liberate the passage in case any other caravans wanted to get by. Candy disappeared inside the wagon while I suggested I stay outside and look out for trouble. There was no reason to believe we were in immediate danger, but I preferred taking the safer option. After all, what was to stop raiders from taking the tracks, too?

I still had a few hours to kill before sunset, and before I would get sleepy again. I climbed onto the wagon to have a better view and started killing time by disassembling and reassembling my rifle. It didn’t take as long as the first time, but that just gave me more opportunities to marvel at how amazing this work of engineering really was. Even rusted and barely functional, it was still gorgeous. After I was done, instead of harnessing it, I decided to use the gun to practice telekinetic steadiness. After all, aiming a rifle would probably be the one application that benefitted the most from stability.

Eventually, I got bored of staring down a rifle and keeping it as immobile as possible. On the bright side, it was starting to come more naturally to me. Still not “second nature”, like the magazine had described, but it was slowly getting easier. Or so I thought. I really couldn’t tell without a side-by-side comparison.

Because of my magic training, I was finally motivated enough to finally delve into the Big Book of Arcane Sciences. Unlike The Mechanical Marvels of Firearms, this book was more like a lexicon. Well, a compendium to be more exact. What this meant in practice was that each section was mostly unrelated to other sections, and that I could start anywhere and read up on any topic.

I glanced over the summary, a few topics and sub-topics catching my attention. I was trying to figure out where to start when I saw a subject that I had been meaning to explore—teleportation. The category it was found in was labelled ‘Superspells’. Curious about what those were, I opened that page first.

“Superspells are, as the name suggests, bigger, more powerful spells. There are two factors that can make a spell ‘super’: complexity and power requirements. Oftentimes a superspell is both complex and power-draining. The category of superspells was until recently not well defined, and any spell that was technically difficult to perform could be labelled as such. Over the past two decades, significant strides in magical research allowed the mathematically robust formalisation of the definition of a superspell, leading to the current definition:

A superspell is an arcano-technical construct requiring more than 500AOpC (Arcane Operations per Cast). This seemingly arbitrary limit was chosen as a rough approximation of the cutoff at which a standard ruby-amethyst spell-matrix would consistently outperform an average unicorn.

Unfortunately, due to word count constraints, this book will not delve into the details of what constitutes a single Arcane Operation. For the avid reader, we can only highly recommend Prof. Sunburst’s thesis that led to this entire field of research.”

Were superspells related to megaspells? I checked the book’s publishing date, and found that it had been written many years before the official announcement of megaspells’ existence. I shrugged and, satisfied with this definition, found the section about teleportation.

Teleportation. Believed to have been originally invented by Starswirl the Bearded, this spell allows a unicorn to cross vast distances in the blink of an eye — leading to one of its casual nicknames, the ‘blink’. In its original version, only the most magically adept unicorns managed to learn and master it, while the contemporan one is accessible to most unicorns interested in the topic.

The recent version, invented and formalised by Prof. Sunburst, utilises modern arcano-mathematical theory to create a spell that is easier to learn, more efficient, and safer than its ancient counterpart. Additional failsafes have been built in to prevent users from ending up inside solid objects.

Like with the majority of superspells, the algorithm invented by Prof. Sunburst is the most reliable way to learn it, and is therefore depicted below in arcane code format. However, unlike most arcano-programs, teleportation has self-correcting elements, meaning that a mostly-correct cast will produce a fully accurate result. Alternatively, if the spell-cast is too far from correct, the code will simply prevent the spell from executing.

Prof. Sunburst deemed it a good idea to make the spell more approachable to beginners, giving stronger feedback in the event of an incorrect cast. However, advanced users might think it beneficial to skip the code responsible for error-checking, as it does add a non-negligible cost at cast-time. However, it is highly discouraged to skip those safety measures: they do prevent a pony from materialising inside a wall, or even another pony.

Unfortunately for me, I had no idea how to read or interpret arcane code. It just hadn’t been on my curriculum. Partly because it was fairly advanced magical theory and would thus require a lot of time to learn, but also because, as the future overmare, I had much more important topics to learn about first. Iodine’s words to Mother echoed in my mind. “A damn shame, really. Filly’s got the perfect horn for magic.”

Thus, I looked through the book’s summary once again. I found the keyword I was looking for near the end, as an appendix. “Arcane Code — an Aide-Mémoire” was the section’s title. A small disclaimer read:

This appendix only aims to act as a cheat-sheet for unicorns familiar with arcane code. It does not teach any of the basic concepts. The full concept of arcane code is far outside the scope of this book, and deserves its own book entirely. Fortunately, many such books can be found. At the time of writing, Prof. Sunburst and Dr. Arcane Spark’s Full Guide to Arcane Programming can be regarded as the golden standard on the matter. However, it is worth noting that the author of The Big Book of Arcane Science has plans on publishing a comprehensive guide to magical theory.

Ah. Back to square one it was, then. I wasn’t giving up here, however. The summary table was again under my scrutiny. At the end of the part on superspells, a single title stood out to me. “Learning superspells for the average unicorn”. Sounded promising.

Not everypony has had the opportunity to learn arcane description languages. For this reason, this section has been written to give a few tips and ideas to help unicorns willing to put in the effort to learn difficult spells. Keep in mind that if you find yourself often learning new superspells, you would likely be able to save a lot of time by learning the description language used in this book, commonly referred to as arcane code.

Now, to learn a superspell without knowing what you’re going for would normally be difficult. The normal hoof-wavy techniques do not apply when the spell you are learning is orders of magnitude more difficult than normal spells. A very motivated teacher is therefore required to help you.

I almost gave up right then and there, but was too engrossed with the topic and too bored to stop reading. Who knew, maybe I’d meet a pony able to teach me a few of those ‘superspells’.

That teacher would have to be somepony willing to demonstrate the spell as many times as necessary, in many different situations. The learning unicorn can then easily observe the magical patterns formed. When the student is ready, he or she may start practicing the channel, and have the teacher observe and correct certain patterns.

In practice this proves fairly difficult, which is why telepathy or memory transfer spells may be used to facilitate the process. However, the latter is mostly beneficial during the first phase, and is rarely of help during the second part—the teacher needs to be able to respond immediately or at least very quickly if the student makes a mistake.

Oh, so not everything was lost. I only had one usage to compare to, but I’d felt it many times. It was far from an ideal learning environment, but it did seem feasible to use it to teach teleportation to myself. I turned to my saddlebags, finding the memory talisman. I dreaded watching the entire memory for one short moment, but it was my only option. I wanted to start working on learning the spell immediately, but I knew I needed at least a small refresher on the spell.

On the other hoof, I did not like the idea of leaving myself and Candy vulnerable while I viewed a memory. Then again… I hadn’t seen anypony in several hours, even on the day before, and it was getting fairly late, so most groups would probably stop for the day. Meanwhile, the wildlife, whose red bars still occasionally showed themselves seemed just as unlikely to attack. Screw it, I needed a useful spell, and the sooner I learned it, the better.

As usual, I recorded the time of entering the memory, and compared it with the exit time. Twenty minutes. I was pleased to find my EFS momentarily empty, save for Candy’s bar. Not wanting to waste any time during which I might have forgotten some of the spell, I started channeling magic. Some like this, some like that, no no, that wasn’t quite right. Maybe... The energy gathered at my horn fizzled.

“Ponyfeathers,” I cursed to myself. I needed to try again. So I did, only to fail in a very similar manner. This was going to prove itself even more difficult than originally presumed. I had gotten a bit further. The tricky part was focusing on my magic while attempting to remember what I needed to do next. The easy part was that I knew the spell well enough that I immediately felt it when my magic made a wrong turn. Or maybe that was part of the spell’s error correction?

It took me many more attempts until I was finally able to reproduce most of the spell. I’d stopped counting after the thirty mark, and my headache had reawakened enough to make me consider eating a mint, but I suppressed the urge.

I wanted to think I was pressing on out of sheer willpower alone, but the truth of the matter was that every time I’d taken a break, boredom had eventually overpowered my magical fatigue. Every time, the idea of a final push made me happy to try again and again.

Okay, now this is my final attempt, I told myself for the seventh time. If I fail this, I’m just going to give up for now. Part of me doubted that thought as it crossed my mind. After all, even my headache hadn’t prevented me from constantly retrying.

My surroundings lit up in red as I shoved a large amount of power into my spell. I’d found that channelling more magic than necessary helped the flow of the spell. I suspected Arcane’s cast was a finely-trained, bare minimum cast, while mine was the crude brute force approach.

Lines and corridors gradually formed the labyrinth that made up this spell. I was getting close! Don’t let that distract you. Thankfully, my aside thought didn’t distract me, and the spell continued as intended, until… I had it! This felt right! I let go of the energy I’d gathered, releasing the spell.

Pop!

Had I succeeded? If so, why was everything dark? And why was my EFS suddenly crowded with red bars? Thankfully, none of them seemed to be in my immediate vicinity. Still, if it appeared on my EFS, it was too close. My initial stupor fading, I realised I could hear water whooshing close to me. In the distance, I could hear tiny squeaks and fast-paced clicks, like tiny claws on concrete, but I couldn’t tell if the noises came from the bars.

Given that I had no idea where I was, I focused my telekinesis on nothing in particular, wincing as my magical fatigue caused my headache to spike again. I just wanted a small source of light that wouldn’t overwhelm my eyes like my PipBuck’s flashlight.

I found myself in a semi-circular tunnel, barely large enough for a regular pony to stand in. Of course, being shorter than the average pony, I had ample room to move. In the middle, water flowed along a small canal. On the sides, every few meters a pipe emerged into the channel, water trickling out of it. Was this a sewer? I didn’t understand the purpose, given this place was nowhere near a settlement of any kind. Maybe it helped evacuate excess water from the fields? No matter, I had more pressing issues.

My first idea was to attempt the spell again. Now that I’d succeeded in casting it, that little bit of challenge was gone, and I didn’t like the idea of putting myself through that pain again. A low, growl-like noise echoed through the tunnel. Yeah no, I’m getting the heck out of here.

I’d managed it once, so I couldn’t think of a reason I wouldn’t manage to do it again. As I channelled the spell once more, I managed to follow the pattern exactly, and… the spell failed. Up until the end, the cast had felt correct, but then it had suddenly snapped back like a rubber band. This sensation sent ripples of pain through my fatigued horn, hurting my brain even more. But why? Everything went right… Had I already misremembered? I massaged my horn for a few moments; a futile attempt to make it feel better. Then, I attempted the spell again, only to meet the same painful fate. Why?

Suddenly, the realisation hit me. Oh. Right. I knew how to teleport in a specific direction. But I did not know how to teleport somewhere else. I am such an idiot. That would explain the problem; I’d probably ended up in this tunnel because the fail safes on the spell had adjusted my destination to avoid materialising me in the ground. I gulped. Maybe playing around with teleportation was not the smartest thing to do, especially not without thinking everything through.

I snapped out of my thoughts and looked left to right, trying to find an exit, but saw none nearby. I suppressed a panicky thought that suggested I would be stuck here. I still had options.

In both directions, red bars could be seen. Only two on the right, though, so I picked that direction and started walking, but not before unharnessing my rifle. After a few seconds, a loud “brooooooooaaaap” echoed in the sewer. In the distance, illuminated by my scarlet light, I could see a giant, bloated, brightly coloured frog. Naturally, my first reaction was to put a bullet right through it, putting into practice my aim training.

The shot echoed explosively through the canal, reigniting my headache and proving that my concussion was not, in fact, healed yet. Immediately after, the frog burst, sending bits of itself flying everywhere. The places hit by its innards started smoking and hissing, leaving behind shallow indents. Note to self: don’t be near acid frog things when they die.

To make matters worse, my PipBuck started slowly clicking, and a sharp pain started spreading through my lungs. Ah. Of course the acid strong enough to melt concrete was emitting dangerous fumes. I should have guessed. I didn’t manage to contain a cough, and the following pain in my chest made me hate life.

Behind me, another one of them was rapidly approaching. In front of me, my EFS only indicated one hostile creature. I didn’t like the idea of what I was about to do, but I needed to flee. Fighting more of those toads was not an option.

I took a few steps backwards, and took in a deep breath. I bit my lower lip as my broken rib was moved along with the rest of its cage. Then I ran as fast as I could, through the poison cloud. My eyes stung and my PipBuck clicked wildly as I ran through the poison gas cloud. Above my EFS, a small red number appeared. At its apex, it read “50rads/s”. I only stopped running when it disappeared and the clicking died down entirely.

In the distance, my eyes caught the glint of a ladder leading upwards. My way out! However, a few metres ahead of it stood the frog my EFS had picked up. Killing it was most likely not a good idea, and that only left me with one option.

I braced myself for the pain in my chest, and sprinted past the frog. It simply croaked in response. Thankfully, they weren’t very agile—or maybe just not that interested in me? Whichever it was, I managed to reach the ladder safely. At the top of it, I could see a round metal hatch. With a wince, I started climbing, every rung bringing in another round of pain.Then I felt a sharp burn on my right hindleg.

The frog had wrapped its glowing green tongue around it. With an abrupt pull, it made me lose my grip on the ladder, and I landed on the concrete floor, banging my head. The world went black and the ringing in my ears came back. I snapped back to reality as quickly as I managed, only to realise that I was being pulled towards the frog’s mouth. I only saw one way out of this situation. I lifted my rifle and the tunnel regained its familiar red colouration. I took a deep breath and held it, before pulling the trigger, causing the creature to explode. Holding my breath was made orders of magnitude more difficult by my burning desire to scream as loud as I could, the fiery agony in my chest, lungs, and head enough to blur my vision.

Somehow, the burning in my leg had spread to my nose. My PipBuck clicked. If I wasted another second I would die. I jumped to my hooves, eyes watering from the pain, and head spinning. I just bit my lip in response, and my mouth started filling with the familiar taste of iron.

I practically jumped up the ladder, forcing my telekinesis through the hatch, and ripping it open. Daylight blinded me, and dirt fell in my eyes, but I climbed out. I was safe.

My leg, nose, and lip were bleeding profusely. But I was safe.

My lungs were on fire, burning with every breath I took. But I was safe.

My broken side was pulsing with agony, every heartbeat and breath causing tides of torment. But I was safe.

I lay there for a few more long minutes, marvelling at the fact that I was safe. I couldn’t believe that mere minutes ago, I’d been idly experimenting with magic, fighting boredom as well as I could, and now I was just happy to be alive.

I was safe.

I lay there for Stars knew how long as my PipBuck idly clicked by. Eventually, the clicking started to worry me enough to overcome the physical exhaustion and soreness. That dial being in the yellow could not possibly be a good thing. My lungs hurt, but I managed to hold back coughs as I limped back to the wagon—I’d teleported almost exactly under it, judging by how far I’d needed to run underground.

I painfully climbed onto the back of the wagon and took the time to inspect myself. My stable jumpsuit was tattered where the amphibian had… licked it. Underneath, a crust had formed above the chemically burnt flesh. It looked so much worse than it felt, and it felt absolutely miserable. The only other part of me that hurt in a similar fashion was my muzzle. Some acid had landed there, hadn’t it?

I’d never really liked my facial features so much, but the thought of having a scar—and this was definitely going to scar—in the middle of it… it saddened me. Then, a scarier thought crossed my mind. This thing hadn’t hit my eye, but it had gotten close. Much too close.

While the realisation I’d have a reminder of this frog on me for the rest of my life saddened me… the idea of losing my eye terrified me. I’d always liked my eyes; their vibrant red had always helped me feel… more myself. Even disregarding their beautiful colouration, they were amazing at their primary function. I had vision better than anypony in the stable—Iodine had told me that—and I was proud of that.

I took a deep breath—well, as deep as I managed, anyway—and slowly started calming down, before considering my options. I really wanted to heal myself, but I knew it wasn’t the optimal decision. Those wounds weren’t an immediate threat to me, and we were starting to run low on medical supplies. Although… we hadn’t searched the wagon we’d inherited from our attacker. He probably even had some weapons. I sighed. Well, at least we had supplies now, even though we’d gone through Tartarus—Candy more so than myself—to acquire them.

My mind flashed images of the dimly lit scene. He’d hurt me way more with his simple kick than my father ever had. Why did they even bother doing things so slowly if they could hurt me like that? Maybe Concerto had wanted to avoid breaking ribs, but what reason did Silver have? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. If it were me, I would just have hurt them as much as possible—without killing them, obviously—instead of messing around back there.

My reverie was broken by a gust of icy wind. I decided to call it an early night, and to go to sleep. Falling asleep was difficult, as my leg itched and hurt, but exhaustion took over quickly enough.

I woke up to Candy bandaging my foreleg. I noticed she’d also put a bandaid on my muzzle. She’d taken off my jumpsuit and was rolling the magically imbued cloth around my leg with practiced grace. No—not practiced grace. There was some noticeable hesitation in her telekinesis. I could tell she didn’t have much experience in this, but it came naturally to her, probably just like I was able to aim rifles so well.

“Uughh,” I groaned as I shifted to sit upright, a slight discomfort in my chest.

“Careful,” Candy replied, the slightest tint of worry in her voice. “I cast an anaesthetic spell on your chest and leg. It may not hurt, but you might injure yourself because you don’t notice when you’re doing something you shouldn’t be. Not that you should be able to move around easily to begin with.” Yeah, I think fighting frog monsters would be something most physicians would recommend against after a fracture.

“Ah. Any reason you didn’t use it on me yesterday? I could have used it on several occasions,” I complained back.

“Well, like I said, the pain is there to stop you from doing any movements you shouldn’t be doing, and I don’t know any weaker pain-numbing spell. Besides, you’ll find it difficult to move properly. There’s not much you can do about a fractured rib other than giving it time to heal,” she explained in her usual calm and happy voice. “Healing potions might make it mend quicker, but we only had one of those, and it wouldn’t have been a miracle cure.”

“I thought we were out of those? And what do you mean ‘had’?” I interrupted.

“Well, I found some in the cart, but now we’re out again.” I cursed myself for having made her waste our only potion on non-fatal wounds. “As well as a shotgun that I could use as backup if mine ever has any issues. And I don’t think I’ll be running out of shells anytime soon, either.”

“Can I have it? I prefer rifles, but having a backup weapon for close quarters sounds useful,” I chimed.

“Oh, sure, I guess. You’ll just have to be careful not to shoot it if you’re behind me; it’s hard to tell where the pellets will go,” she explained.

“I know, I know,” I reassured her. “Remember, I’m the gun nut here.” I stuck out my tongue at her. I was surprised at how light the mood was, especially compared to the day before. As usual, firearms improved my mood.

Candy giggled playfully. “Now, miss ‘gun nut’, could you please slowly stand up so I can bandage your chest as well? I’ll help you up. I think the magic should speed up your rib’s recovery, if only a bit,” she teased. I wanted to protest, but as the memory of the pain resurfaced, that desire was silenced.

We continued our chat while she wrapped another roll around my midsection, and we eventually ate breakfast—Sugar Bombs. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but both of us wanted to get moving—no point staying here if it was already bright enough to see. We determined it was best if I didn’t try to keep up with her, and so I simply sat down at the front of the wagon again. Candy’s gait was back to being bouncy and happy.

“Hey, Candy, are you okay? You seem awfully peppy, compared to yesterday.” There was no point hiding my worry. It might just lead to her getting hurt again.

“Oh, yeah. I just needed a good night of sleep to reset my system, I suppose. No doubt it will stay with me for a long while, but if I focus on the here and now, I’ll slowly make my way forward and eventually overcome it.” She paused, sighing. “It also helps when I take inspiration from you.”

“From me?” The words left my muzzle before I even had a chance to realise. “Oh right, because my father beat me too. Sorry, spoke too quickly.”

“Well, not just beating, but also…” She stopped herself. I couldn’t see her face, so I couldn’t hope to figure out why. Did she see something and got distracted? I waited a few more seconds before asking.

“But also… what?” I inquired, unwittingly tilting my head to the side.

“The…” she paused, hesitation marking her tone. This silence lasted much shorter than the previous one, however. “Nevermind. Please forget I said anything.”

“But I’m curiooouuus,” I whined. I quickly regretted that decision, as I realised that she probably had a good reason for her words.

Candy stopped walking to turn around and give me a serious look. “I’m sorry, Iron, but I really wouldn’t want to open up that wound for you. And frankly speaking, I would rather prefer to close that book for myself.”

I was still as lost, but at least it felt like she was being real with me. “I understand. Can I ask you one last question about this, though? I think it’s related, but I can’t tell for sure.”

Candy didn’t hide the look of reluctance in her eyes, but after a while she did reply. “I suppose so, if it helps you feel better.”

“What is ‘rape’?” I asked. Given the context, I couldn’t help but feel like I was asking something terrible, but I needed to know.

Her face betrayed her incredulity, then her unease as she momentarily looked for words. After a short while, she answered in a neutral, yet odd tone. “Rape is non-consentual sex.”

“Oooh, I see.” I nodded in understanding, though that left a question. “What’s sex?” I had my suspicion, but I wanted a precise definition.

Candy’s expression turned from slight unease yet overall serenity to complete and utter shock.

What?

During our entire conversation—during which we hadn’t been moving forward—she had been very flustered. I couldn’t understand why one would blush this much when talking about a simple biological function of the equine body. Well, perhaps simple wasn’t the best way to describe it, given the complicated terminology surrounding it, but it definitely didn’t seem like anything to be ashamed of.

I’d often wondered why some stallions were beating their wives during my walks in the stable’s vent system, him on top of her. My mind was dragged to my father, but I quickly shook the thought away.

I hadn’t found anything on the subject within the books we had at our quarters. If it was a requirement in order to produce foals, I could understand why it was done by seemingly loving couples.

During our talk, images of my father momentarily crossed my mind, before being replaced by images of his terrified, ugly face right before I put a bullet thr—

“What I still don’t understand is how your parents never taught you about it. Foals normally get curious and ask something along the lines of ‘where do foals come from’ of their parents,” she pondered.

“I did ask Mother, but she replied that I would learn about it ‘in a few years’ once I tackled biology. When I heard that, I just waited, because there wasn’t much point to rearranging my curriculum.” Well, I had been pretty impatient at first, but eventually I’d gotten over my curiosity.

“That sounds like she just dodged the question. If that’s the case, then that likely means she was an accomplice in what your father did to you.” Candy looked me in the eyes, worry clear on her face.

“Could be,” I shrugged, “but I think she just didn’t want to give me a too general overview of the topic. From what you’ve told me it sounds complicated and would deserve full lessons.” My mind continued wandering around my mental image of the stable and its politics. Those were what really mattered for a future overmare.

“I’m not very convinced, but you do know her better than I do, so I shouldn’t be making assumptions. Still, this is a pretty big thing to completely omit to your child, especially since you likely already had your implant.” My thoughts suddenly landed on Zinc. I must’ve made a face, as Candy asked me, “What? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. It’s just that my would-be future husband crossed my mind, and the thought of having sexual intercourse again was not very pleasant,” I replied truthfully.

“Oh.” She gave my neck a nuzzle and gently stroked my mane. “It’s okay, you’re fine now, we’re far from all that.”

She was right. “Yet another reason to be happy we’re out of there,” I remarked.

The lavender pony nodded, then looked puzzled before asking. “What did you mean by ‘future husband’? Were you going to have to take an arranged marriage? With who?” Whom, my mind corrected, but I didn’t say anything.

“Zinc, Iodine’s grandson. Mother never talked to me about it, but it was as clear as the atrium lights that I would need to marry somepony wealthy in order to become the overmare.”

“Who said you had to be overmare?” Candy asked, sounding surprisingly naive.

“Well, my whole education revolved around me taking on that position eventually. Mother did want me to find my own cutie mark, so that I could do something while waiting to take on the role.” Wait, who will be the next overmare after Mother passes? Well, she probably has a plan for that.

“Are there really no other options? Surely you would have had a choice,” wondered my friend.

I just shook my head. “No. Well, it would have been either him or you. Otherwise, there would have been the chance that somepony could take the position from me mid-term.”

Candy looked shocked and appalled. “Me‽”

“Yeah, don’t you know that your side of the family is amongst the wealthiest in the stable? Only reason Zinc would have been picked over you is because same gender marriages are usually avoided for the overmare position.” I took a small break to catch my breath. “And I think I understand why, now that you’ve told me about sex. Especially given that the previous overmare had to abdicate in the middle of her term due to her lack of living relatives. Had she had children, the situation would have been different, because they could have supported her until she was ready to retire,” I replied matter-of-factly. It felt nice to be more knowledgeable than Candy on a certain topic.

“I can’t say I’m too fond of that idea,” she admitted.

“Me neither, though I would have much preferred marrying you over Zinc. At least you’re smart and kind.” Another realisation crossed my mind. “And I wouldn’t have had to have sex with you, so that would also have been a big plus.” Wait… “Actually, when I think of it, I think I would even have liked marrying you.”

“Uh huh,” she stated, then turned around and attached the cart’s harness to herself. “Now, we should get going. We stuck around here for too long, actually.” An awkward silence fell upon us. I had a hard time accepting it could be because of something I’d said, but I wasn’t certain. I didn’t think Candy would be the type to be offended by a pragmatic marriage, given how common they were for ponies of our standing, but I couldn’t fully chase the thought away. She probably just wanted to get to New Detrot as quickly as possible, and I was just imagining how awkward this silence felt.

The rest of the trip went by quietly. I couldn’t find a topic to bring up, and even considered taking one of my candies to help me think, but decided against it. If I had an unlimited supply of them, I could use them on things like that, but as it stood, I had to conserve them for more important matters. Instead, I spent the trip polishing and inspecting my rifle, despite my latent magical fatigue. With enough time and patience, this thing would eventually return to full functionality, though I suspected I needed to swap out some parts, either by making my own, or by cannibalising another rifle of a similar type. The latter option seemed easier, but it required finding another gun like mine and hoping the set of damaged parts was disjoint.

I was even able to polish the inside of the barrel, careful to run my telekinesis alongside the grooves, rather than over them. The spin helped stabilise the bullets’ trajectory, and polishing it away would have been counterproductive.

Eventually, Candy broke the silence by asking me how I had gotten injured, and I explained the whole situation to her.

We arrived in what resembled a train station, with the two parallel tracks turning into three, then four, then a half dozen. I watched my PipBuck intently as we approached it, until it flashed the new location onto the map. For the briefest moment, it labelled it as ‘Foal Junction’, before switching over to ‘New Detrot’. How did it do that? It was probably far beyond my current understanding, but I hoped to one day know enough to figure it out.

Once closer to the actual train station, I noticed ramps leading up from the tracks onto the platforms. It was clear they were added after the original design of this structure, probably even post-war. On top of the roof above the platforms, I spotted the silhouette of a winged creature. I could tell it wasn’t a pony, but it was advanced enough to wield a rifle. I couldn’t see exactly, but it seemed much bigger than my own, and I felt a spike of jealousy. I quickly pushed it aside.

When we were within ear shot, she called out to us in a deep, but recognisably female voice. “Hey!” shouted the griffin—presumably; she matched the descriptions I’d read of the species. Surprisingly, the armour she wore reminded me of Candy’s, sharing the same blue textile colour, as well as the black plating. “Oh, stable dwellers. Stockpile mentioned you. Come on in.”

Candy looked back at me in confusion. I spoke in a low tone that the griffin couldn’t hear. “I think she means under the roof. I’ll help you push the wagon up the ramp,” I said, getting ready to get down from the wagon.

“No, don’t push it in your cond—” I simply tapped my horn and she stopped herself. “Right, I keep forgetting other unicorns actually have strength behind their telekinesis.” Was her horn really that weak? She had been able to use potent nerve magic, so she couldn’t really be that weak… right?

As we pushed the wagon onto the platform, I noticed two more white bars pop up on my EFS. Given that I couldn’t see them, I suspected they were on the roof along the first griffin, who flew down, landing next to us. “Welcome to New Detrot. I need to get back to guard duty, but you should meet Gust inside the main building.” That name rang a bell… Right! He had my bounty for killing the raiders.

She pointed to our right, where a large concrete structure extended past platform one. “With how cold it’s been the past few days, we haven’t had many new visitors, but you’ll find a few traders inside.” She turned to take off again, but then looked at us again. “My name’s Gale, by the way.”

After the large bird took off, Candy whispered to me, “I’m not sure if we should trust her…”

“We don’t have to trust her,” I replied. “Let’s just not put ourselves in any situation where we might have to.”

“Well, yeah, but you’ve seen how well-armed she is. She could just kill us.”

“Yeah, and she hasn’t. I completely agree that we shouldn’t turn our backs to strangers anymore, but if she and the other pon—people on the roof wanted to hurt us, they probably would already have tried something. By the size of that barrel, that rifle would be accurate at least five hundred metres, maybe more.” I was getting distracted. “I’m just as on edge as you, but if they’re all this well-armed, they don’t need to drug our food to hurt us.”

“There’s others?” she questioned, incredulous.

“Yeah. I can see them on my EFS. All white bars, though.”

“Ah, I see. We should lock the wagon and chain it to one of the pillars, I think. It’s ours now, and I wouldn’t want somepony to steal it, and I don’t trust the guards to not at least attempt it.”

I nodded in agreement and, five minutes later, we were crossing the train tracks. I regretted this decision when I realised I would have to climb back onto the platform. With Candy’s help, it ended up much less painful than if I’d tried doing it alone. I wished I could just teleport us—or at least myself—across the gaps. That, in turn, brought back memories of the noxious rad-toads, or whatever they were.

“I think we should find a way around, maybe take the stairs below. The platforms seem to connected underground.” It wasn’t a very difficult or shocking conclusion, it almost felt like I was stating the obvious.

Underground, yellowed white paint was peeling off the tile walls. In fact, most of the paint was gone, and only remained in a few places where it became obvious this had been a rushed paint job to hide the aging tiles. Our hooves clacked loudly against the concrete floor, echoing throughout the entire tunnel. The unpleasant odour of dried urine hit my nostrils. Why would anypony pick some underground tunnel, out of all the options in Equestria, to relieve themself? I groaned. The attack on my sense of smell ended when we climbed a staircase, leaving the tunnel.

When we finally entered the train station building—this one much bigger than the one near Foal Mountain—we found a few ponies sitting inside on benches, chatting. Leaning against the back wall stood a griffin, carefully eyeing Candy and I. His Stable-Tec security armour holstered both a baton and some kind of short automatic rifle.

On the sides, tables had been arranged as trading stands, with merchandise sitting on top. Even though the room looked far from empty, I could tell many more merchants could normally have stands here. One earth pony’s stand sold produce that looked relatively fresh. Another one, occupied by a unicorn, sold various pre-war items, like eating utensils, clothing, and soap, but also—somehow still edible—packaged food.

The last stand that had items on it almost made me drool. A rifle, a shotgun, several pistols, and a carbine lay on the table. They all looked in better condition than my varmint rifle, but none of them looked fresh like the shotguns me and Candy had taken from the stable. Well, mine was broken, but if we ignored that small detail, it looked much better than those.

Still, these weapons looked amazing. I wanted to try all of them, but then I remembered—we had no money. It was then I realised that I had, in fact, been drooling. In my defense, it wasn’t much, but Candy did give me a look.

The last table did not seem to have any merchandise on it. Instead, a griffin male—presumably, given that he looked gruffer than the other members of his species we’d encountered—sat at it, writing idly on a sheet of yellowed paper. The wall to his right was covered with posters tacked onto the wood. Could this be Gust? He must have noticed my gaze as he perked up, meeting it with his green eyes.

“Hello, welcome to New Detrot, how may I help you?” Realisation dawned in his eyes. “You’re the stable dwellers Stockpile mentioned, aren’t you?” he said in a flat, neutral voice. It ever so slightly reminded me of Mother’s voice.

“I think so,” Candy replied. “Unless there were more of us that I’m not aware of.” She let out a small giggle, and Gust also chuckled.

“Well, I have fifty caps for you. If you spend them here, we can just figure out a tab and save me the trouble of counting all of them out.” He shrugged. “I just can’t stand counting caps any more than necessary.”

My friend turned to me, nonverbally asking me for my input, much to my own surprise. It felt… odd to have an adult not only care for my opinion, but to actively seek it out. And so, I complied, “Well, I don’t see why this place would be any worse than others. And we need supplies anyway.”

She nodded in reply. “That’s what was on my mind as well.” She turned back to Gust. ”Sure.”

Then, he announced our credit to the whole room, and gave us a sheet of paper for the merchants to write how much they’d charged us. Then, the two of us first walked towards the produce merchant. Given our extra day travelling—even with the things from Silver’s chariot—we were almost out of food, and we figured we wanted something fresh.

That turned out to be a mistake, as the vegetables and lettuces seemed to cost five times as much as the other stand’s packaged foods. Neither of us could tell how much caps were truly worth, but ten of them for one apple was definitely not within our budget. Maybe once we had a more substantial fortune and source of income, but for now we needed to stick with the cheap option. With twenty caps, we bought what would hopefully last us for two days.

We decided it would be a good idea to set aside some caps. Gust hadn’t said we needed to spend all of them, just that he didn’t feel like counting out such an amount. Fifteen caps were spent buying ammunition for my rifle. Thankfully, .22LR rounds seemed to be one of the cheapest cartridges to buy. It made sense, given how much smaller they were. Because of their size, they were also able to reach very high velocities, but didn’t have much destructive ability compared to larger rounds.

I packed the dozen small bullets into my harness’ pouch and asked the merchant, “Do you have anything that could help repair my rifle? It’s in fairly terrible shape. Of course, I might not be able to afford it, but I’d like to ask anyway.”

“Well, I don’t have any individual parts, but I do have a fairly unusable varmint rifle I could scrap to repair yours. Wouldn’t be that expensive, probably twenty, maybe thirty caps since it’s a fairly simple gun, depends which parts I can swap out,” the merchant stated, much to my disappointment. We didn’t have that much.

“How much would just the gun cost?” I was pretty confident I could do it myself. After all, I’d spent a lot of time rummaging around the inner workings of mine, how difficult could this be?

“Well, I probably wouldn’t sell it for more than five or ten caps, but just giving it to you would be a waste, I feel. So unless your sister really knows her way around guns, I’d rather just do it myself.”

“I don’t need the whole rifle. I just need to replace the firing pin. The receiver is dented in certain places and rusted through in others. I don’t have any tools to fix it, so I’m thinking of just replacing it. The spring inside the bolt is also worrying me. The bolt’s hull is also slightly damaged, but it’s not a priority,” I stated flatly, staring him in the eyes. Technically, even the barrel needed to be replaced. This entire weapon was in a terrible state, really.

“Or maybe you know your way around guns. Fine, I’ll sell it for five caps, but I don’t think the receiver is in a great shape, either. Dunno about the firing pin.” He shrugged and reached into the duffle bag behind him, and wrote down another line on our tab.

With this, we’d gone through forty-five of our caps. I wanted more ammo, but Candy insisted we were better off holding onto some money, and I was inclined to agree. Still, we needed to find a way to make more, or to scavenge for food.

We approached Gust’s table again, and he took a quick look at the sheet before digging out the caps from a bag behind him. When he handed them to Candy, she asked him. “Is there any job we could do around here?” Glancing at the posters behind him, she then quickly added, “Preferably one not involving murder.”

“Well, there are always some errands to run,” replied the griffin. “We have a notice board, but I actually have something a bit more pressing. You see, our resident radio host, Airwaves, has gone missing, again.” He rolled his eyes. “Yesterday afternoon, she said something about scavenging old electronics for her station, and today she’s been missing the whole day.”

Candy nodded in understanding. “And you want us to find her?” If she was still alive. In this cold, she would have died if she stayed out the night. And where would we even start looking?

“Correct. She always scavenges for electronics in the old metro tunnels. I suspect she might have gotten swarmed by ghouls, since those things tend to flock underground when it’s as cold as now. She’s pretty nimble, being a pegasus and all, so I doubt she got caught. Most likely, she just barricaded herself in a room and can’t leave due to the ghouls.”

Once more, Candy Cane looked at me. It was still hard to fully wrap around the fact that she cared about what I thought. But then again, she wasn’t just an adult, she was also my friend. It made some sense, after all. “It sounds awfully dangerous, don’t you think? And how would we find her, anyway?” If a proper wastelander couldn’t handle those ghouls, then what odds did we stand?

“I’m not asking you to necessarily bring her back, just to find her. I have her PipBuck tag written down somewhere, that should help you find her. With your EFS, you should be able to tell if there’s a crowd. If there is, you can just come back, if there ain’t, well… they likely ate her and dispersed.” Oh, of course those things eat ponies. I don’t know why it didn’t cross my mind earlier…

“I suppose that’s reasonable,” said Candy. “But why us? Surely you have somepony better for the job.

Gust shook his head. “None of my griffs are available, and it would take someone a day to search every metro station around here. You two have PipBucks, that already makes the whole thing easier.” I furrowed my eyebrows and frowned in thought.

“Why does nopo—nobody else have another PipBuck?” I asked the griffin.

“Only the best of us get PipBucks, and those tend to work in more important places. She had hers before even working for me. What’s it matter to you?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Nothing, just curious,” I admitted.

We agreed on the terms. Twenty caps to walk East for less than an hour, according to the PipBuck map. If we had the opportunity to and did bring her back, we would get a bonus—even if we only brought back a corpse. He explained the directions to us, and to my amazement, my PipBuck showed a marker on my EFS. Candy seemed to have it too, as she turned to look in its direction, but unlike me, she wasn’t awed. She’d probably used this feature before, after all.

We decided to leave our cart here. We’d taken most of our valuables out of it, and the New Detrot train station was well enough guarded that nopony would try to steal it without the guard’s accords. While we didn’t like the idea of trusting the armed griffins—or anypony in New Detrot, for that matter—there was also no real reason for them to steal a cart like ours. Would be bad for business, after all.

After maybe fifty minutes of walking, I was still surprisingly energetic. Then again, I hadn’t had too many issues walking down Foal Mountain, so maybe a day or two of rest was all I’d needed. Though I probably also needed to start eating properly again. In the week I’d spent outside, I’d gotten slightly skinnier, and given I’d always been skirting the line to underweight, this was definitely not a good thing. My ribs prominently protruded from underneath my coat. This was likely how Candy was so confident one of them was broken, since one of the bones was not perfectly in line with the rest.

I attempted to turn my attention away from my chest and towards the road. Thinking about it seemed to make the pain worse, but forgetting about it led me to do reckless things that made it hurt much worse. There was no winning with this injury, was there?

We eventually reached the entrance to the metro our PipBucks had been pointing to. Gust had discouraged us from entering the tunnel prematurely, and so we’d ended up walking most of the way above ground. We found out that the green and the red metro lines met up in Marey Junction, which was a day—roughly ten hours—from New Detrot on hoof. The sheer scale of the region baffled both Candy and I.

I’d read about it prior—about the rapid growth of the region during the late Celestian rule due to a sudden golden industrial age—and knew how it had led to one of the most spread out centers of population in pre-bomb Equestria. Seeing it in person, and having already walked so much, however, was a very different experience. Fifty kilometres did not seem like a lot until you had to cover it on hoof.

As we walked down the ramp—there were stairs, but my injury made me avoid those—red bars started appearing, one by one. By the time we arrived at the bottom, there were six. No, seven. The bad part was that they all roughly coincided with our target marker. “I think this is good enough. We know there’s a crowd of red bars there, that should suffice. I don’t think we can fight this many ghouls, so I would rather remain unnoticed,” I told Candy.

“Ah, you see bars? Well, I’d rather check out the crowd anyway. I’d feel bad for half-assing a job. We don’t need to get that close, just close enough to make sure.” I wasn’t too keen on the idea, but she did have a point, especially since Airwave’s bar hadn’t appeared yet. What worried me was how dark the tunnel was, but that could work to our advantage as well, especially since we had PipBucks, and they likely did not.

We slowly advanced into the darkness, careful to not make any noise, until eventually, a single white bar appeared, slightly to the right of the crowd. I tried to whisper to Candy, but she was too far to hear me. I considered my options. I could either call out to her slightly louder, or catch her attention in other ways. If I touched her telekinetically, she might get shocked and make a sound, but I suspected it wouldn’t be louder than her hoofsteps. I tugged on her saddlebags. Big mistake, as she audibly gasped. Louder than her hoofsteps.

Immediately, steps could be heard as the red bars started moving. Candy immediately took a combat stance, shotgun floating by her side. “Iron, if you could light up the tunnel side-to-side with your magic, that would be perfect.”

I telekinetically unharnessed my rifle, and started channelling more and more magic into my grip until my horn was blindingly scarlet, illuminating a huge portion of the underground metro.

I’d never channelled this much energy into simple telekinesis. I might have used a similar amount when popping the raider’s head, but never had I poured this much power into holding a relatively light object.

The effect was unexpected. Since the extra power wasn’t used as raw strength, it ended up manifesting as added sensitivity. I could feel every nook and microscopic fissure on the surface of the metal’s surface. I could even notice how it moved alongside my breathing. This would come in handy for keeping my gun steady, and would help me aim. Granted, short-range it wouldn’t make a huge difference, but it was still a good trick to remember.

I snapped out of my brief reverie to find a flock of ghouls rushing towards Candy. With my improved control, it wasn’t difficult to swing my rifle exactly where I meant to. However, channelling this much magic wasn’t practical, since I had to split my concentration between aiming and maintaining my telekinesis. Instead, I just clicked into SATS and queued two shots at two different ghouls’ heads, the spell estimating the likelihood to hit at ninety-five percent each.

As I pulled the trigger, I felt the hammer release, accelerated by the spring, slam the firing pin, the latter hit the cartridge, the primer ignite, and the explosion spread to the gunpowder. The entire experience sent shivers through my whole body. It was as pleasant as a hot shower, but not in the same, relaxing manner. To my telekinetic touch, it felt like a gorgeous, upbeat tune felt to my ears. It was like touching a soft fabric with my hooves. It was all those things together, but also just so much better.

My telekinesis stopped my rifle’s recoil dead in its tracks, but I lost some sensitivity as the gun exerted a force inside my grip. Then, I felt my telekinesis pull back the bolt, the magazine feed another .22 calibre round into the chamber, and the bolt slide back into place, guided by my magic. The firing process repeated, feeling just as exquisite as before, sending ripples of ecstasy through my horn.

When the spell ended, I found myself panting. The reason was beyond me, but now that I was out of SATS charges, I started worrying I would have to go for body shots. I had a hard time focusing on the spell, so I doubted I’d be able to land hits on moving targets. Not to mention, I didn’t have .22 calibre ammo to waste. Instead, I pulled out my 10mm pistol. I had more bullets for it, and they were slightly more destructive when going for body shots—at least according to my theory. Ideally, I would have used my shotgun, but with Candy this close to me, I didn’t want to risk any stray pellets reaching her.

Shot after shot sent waves of pleasure through my horn and mind, and I started laughing every time my shots sent sickly green fulid flying. On average, I needed three shots to down a ghoul. I didn’t pay much mind to Candy, but I could tell she was smashing ghouls, and probably having just as much fun as I did. My pistol’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber, and I noticed in horror that one ghoul was still running at me.

My telekinesis fumbled for my spare magazine, and the world slowed to a crawl as I realised that it was futile. I was about to get killed. My mind regretted not having grabbed for the rifle instead, knowing very well it was now too late to shoot it. I entered SATS, but the spell refused to do anything. Was this the end? I released the spell, hoping it wouldn’t be painful.

Instead of pain came a shotgun’s roar, and next thing I knew, the ghoul lay on the ground, shredded up by lead pellets. Candy then turned around to the last red bar, and squashed the ghoul’s head between the wall and her right hindleg with a swift and powerful buck, before wiping her hoof clean on the concrete. She turned to me and asked if I was alright. I nodded in reply, heart racing, hooves shaking, breathing heavy. She then made a comment on how much she hated ghouls.

I turned on my PipBuck’s flashlight and stopped channelling huge amounts of magic into my telekinesis. I immediately missed the hyper-sensitive touch I’d had for the past minute or two. Then, my head throbbed. I hadn’t realised how much power I’d been pushing until I’d stopped, and the sudden stop hit me like recoil. How long could I even have kept going? Now that it was gone, my magic sense felt… empty, in a way. It was like when sometimes my eyes would lose focus and my vision would blur, and I’d end up staring into blank space.

The door in the wall opened, and a dirt grey pegasus mare cautiously stepped through the frame. To my surprise, she was neither armed nor armoured. “You here to rescue me?” she asked, squinting her emerald eyes at the harsh PipBuck light. Noticing this, I quickly aimed my flashlight away from her.

“Yeah,” replied Candy. “We weren’t originally supposed to fight the ghouls, we were just here to confirm what was happening.”

“Neato. You gals wanna help me carry some of my loot to my place?” the pegasus asked. “I’ll pay you, and buy you a drink or two,” she added nonchalantly, tucking her yellow-and-purple bangs back behind her ear. What an… interesting character.

We agreed, and each of us started packing some of the delicate electronics the pegasus had extracted. All that remained was a single heavy-looking metal box. Airwaves looked at it and sighed. “I guess one of the griffs is gonna have to come get it.” She glanced at Candy. “Although… You look strong enough that you might be able to carry it, if we strap it to your back. What do you say, for an extra fifteen caps?”

Candy just nodded confidently in reply, and we decided I’d help her get the box onto her back. Part of me was hoping the pegasus would be amazed by my strength. As I started channeling energy into lifting the heavy box, something felt off. My magic felt… sore? That was the best way I could describe it. It almost felt like a muscle I’d overused. That had never happened to me before.

Finally, the box lifted off the ground, right as my headache was reaching its apex. Kssshhhh… The red glow faded, and the box promptly fell back to the ground. The pain in my skull was pounding. What was going on? I tried again, only to find that my magic wasn’t responding at all. I tried again, but only got a pulse of pain as a result.

“That’s… unfortunate,” whispered Candy. “Did you burn out?”

“Burn out? What’s that…?” I countered her question with one of my own.

“I’ll… explain later,” she replied.

The two mares scrambled to attach the block to Candy’s back, while I sat back, too embarrassed to speak up. My magic had never failed me, why did it have to right after meeting someone for the first time? I wanted to sink into the ground.

During the trip back, the pegasus complained to us about how it was Gust’s fault she had been stuck down there. Apparently, the griffin had told her that she needed to wait a few days until he could send one of his Talons along with her. She told us she couldn’t wait that long, and so she decided to scavenge on her own, safety be damned. I kept my opinion that she was unnecessarily reckless to myself.

When we returned to New Detrot, Gust gave us our payment, as well as a bonus of fifteen caps for also bringing Airwaves back. It didn’t cover the cost of the ammunition I’d expended, but since it wasn’t in our agreement, he refused to pay extra. However, with the added thirty-five caps from the radio mare, we did make profit. Candy had been happy to help a pony in need, but I didn’t really care. A griffin would have rescued her eventually anyway.

Airwaves invited us to come by Moonshine’s bar for a drink in a few hours. Given that it was starting to get dark, Candy and I wanted to find a quiet place to hide the wagon and later sleep. As she pulled it away from the train station, she started a conversation. “You know, that was really impressive, in the metro.”

“You… think so?” I replied. My ego was still hurt by my inability to lift some box. I should ask her about that. Or maybe I could find some information on it in the Big Book of Arcane Science (Definitive Edition).

“Yeah. Your aim was really good, I’m proud of you. On top of that, knowing you had my left side covered allowed me to fight better than I otherwise could have.” She turned to me, shooting me a smile that instantly made me happier. “Of course, that overglow you channeled helped me see, so I suppose that was even more important, thanks.”

“I’m glad to help, but what do you mean by overglow? I think I saw that word in the Big Book of Arcane Science, but I didn’t have the time to read about it yet,” I answered, unsure.

“It’s when you pour more magic than needed into a spell, or something like that. I never paid much attention in magic class, but I’m surprised you didn’t even hear of it. Come to think of it, it’s even stranger that you didn’t know about burnout,” she said, turning her gaze forward again.

“Well, like I told you, the focus of my education was mostly on stable and pre-stable history. Magic was mostly something I experimented with during my free time, and when Mother gave me time to explore my cutie mark options. Could you tell me more about burnouts?”

“We say that unicorns ‘burn out’ when we overuse our magic. Most of us experience it as young foals, so I’m surprised you didn’t know about it. Though your explanation makes sense, and it even explains why you would have used overglow instead of a simple light spell.”

“There’s light spells?” I said, perplexed. On second thought it made sense, but the possibility had never crossed my mind.

She replied, “Yeah, it’s a basic spell found in any foal’s magic book.”

“Oh, Mother told me I could skip those, since magic came so naturally to me.”

The pink mare was shocked for a moment, then she raised an eyebrow before saying, “It’s odd that your cutie mark isn’t related to magic, given how strong yours is.”

“Well, just because my body is able to, doesn’t mean I need a cutie mark in it. You don’t have a zombie kicking cutie mark, do you?” I countered.

“You do have a point,” she conceded. “Still, I can’t help but think Aunt Brass should have taught you more magic, to at least some extent.”

“I did learn a few spells,” I retorted. “But magic just isn’t the most interesting thing to me. It’s a cool tool and does have intriguing aspects, but I wouldn’t really wanna learn it just for the sake of learning it.” Well, I’d gotten curious about teleportation, but that had seriously backfired, and I’d learned my lesson.

“Hmm. I suppose you can’t just force an interest.”

We’d hidden the wagon in some pre-war house’s garage, making sure nopony had seen us. As usual, we took our actual valuables with us. It did weigh us down more than necessary, but we didn’t like the idea of losing what little we had. Admittedly, the idea of losing the wagon wasn’t pleasant either—it was a useful way of surviving cold nights in between settlements, after all—but the cart did bring out negative feelings, too.

We entered Moonshine’s bar. At the entrance, a sign read: “Mom’s Kitchen. Stir up trouble and you’re getting shot.” Charming.

The inside was surprisingly similar to the small diner in Stable 4, with a large metal counter to our left, surrounded by tall stools. Tables with regular chairs were scattered in the rest of the room. Many ponies sat around the counter, some engaged in casual discussion, laughing, while others simply enjoyed their drinks.

Most of the tables were either empty or fully populated. Only exception was the one at which the pegasus mare sat, vacantly staring in the general direction of the counter. As we approached her, she noticed us and greeted us with a warm ‘hello’. In front of her stood a bottle branded ‘Wild Pegasus Whiskey’, full of amber liquid, as well as three glasses. She pointed at it, asking us if we wanted any, then opened the bottle.

Because I was intrigued by the alcohol and wondered if it tasted similarly terrible to the sips of wine I’d had, I was tempted to accept, but before I had the chance to, Candy spoke up, “Well, we’re both too young to drink. Or maybe not? I’m not too familiar with the laws—uh I guess the standards?—out in the wasteland.” Wonderfully awkward, Candy.

“Her? She’s pretty short, so I could buy that she’s a filly,” I was surprised she didn’t immediately think of me as one, “but you? At the youngest, you look a couple of years younger than me,” Airwaves stated, then pondered. “Well, I suppose it might be different in stables.”

“Then I’ll gladly take a glass,” the unicorn replied with a smile. “I just hope I can handle it…” she muttered, low enough that I was confident the pegasus didn’t hear.

As Airwaves finished pouring half a glass of the liquid, she turned to me. “What about you? Or are you actually as young as she suggested? It’s hard to tell, ‘cause you have this gloomy look on your face. Oh, and the scar certainly gives you a more mature vibe, y’know?” Was she always such a chatterbox? I’m glad she’s not like that with the news, ‘cause that would make them get old pretty quickly. Or is it the alcohol? I know adults get weird when they drink too much of the stuff.

“I… don’t know if I’ll like it. Can I have just a bit?” Candy shot me a look that clearly meant ‘you sure about this?’. I nodded reassuringly at her. If it tasted as bad as wine, she could just have my glass of the stuff.

I grabbed the glass in my red aura and drank half of the alcohol in one gulp. Big mistake. My mouth and throat were set on fire, and I coughed. I almost felt like vomiting. By the stars, this beverage was vile! After a few agonizing seconds, I was finally able to partly regain my surroundings. Candy was staring at me in concern, while Airwaves was making a face like she was trying—and almost failing—to conceal a fit of laughter. I swallowed my pride—it tasted less disgusting than whiskey—and asked, “Can I get some water, please?” Water was one of the things we’d left in our wagon.

Candy immediately stood up to the bar. I needed to get rid of this aftertaste, and I doubted water would do the trick. Ugh. Fine, this was an emergency situation, and it warranted using some of my limited supply of candy. It was late enough that the sugar crash wouldn’t be an issue, anyway.

I turned to my saddlebags and levitated out my tin of mint-als, placing one underneath my tongue. It… slightly helped. Maybe the water would do better. I raised my gaze to the pegasus again, whose expression had changed to perplexed, with a hint of shock. Her mouth was open, as if wanting to say something, but as I looked into her eyes, she closed it again. Good, I didn’t really want to talk until I had some water to rinse my palate.

Candy returned, fuming, with a water bottle in her pink telekinesis. “Thirty caps for some clean water, would you believe that‽” Stars curse me. Had I just wasted thirty of our caps? Too late to complain now. I grabbed the water and took several large swigs, lodging my mint in between my teeth and cheek to avoid swallowing it. Maybe we should start considering water a valuable as well…

“That’s the price you pay for the fancy, purified water,” commented Airwaves.

“Well, it was that or dirty water,” whined Candy. She levitated her glass to her lips and took a gentle sip, and somehow didn’t almost die, unlike me.

“It’s not that dirty, it’s what everypony drinks. Clean stuff’s expensive ‘cause it costs power to produce-slash-purify, and that’s not something we have a lot of around here.”

“I’m surprised there even is any power at all,” I commented. “Judging by the state of the world.”

Airwaves giggled at my comment, and gave me an amused look. “You think hundred and eighty years would pass by, and ponies wouldn’t at least try to rebuild the world?” She took a sip from her poison.

“You… have a point. It’s just that everything seems to be in such terrible shape,” I replied, feeling silly.

“Honestly, if it weren’t for those Celestia-damned pegasi, we’d be much further along the reconstruction. Agriculture is our biggest concern.” She swooshed the liquid around in her glass before taking another sip.

Wasn’t she a pegasus? What did she mean by that? I had to find a way to ask that without sounding clueless. Well, it’s not like it would be the end of the world if I did sound clueless. Oh, the candy was starting to take effect, and I had an idea of how to ask without sounding dumb. Before I could voice it, however, Candy said, “What do you mean by that? Aren’t you a pegasus?”

“I meant the Enclave.” She giggled and stuck out her tongue.

“The what?” was Candy’s response.

“Right. Stable dwellers.” She sighed. “I’m not in the mood to give you guys a proper history lesson on the wasteland and how fucked up it is, but I’ll tell you this much. You ever wonder why the clouds never lift?”

Candy nodded. “Well, I was starting to wonder when we would see the sun.”

“Likely never. Maybe once, if you get lucky. Pegasi use the clouds to grow crops so that they can stay up there and let us rot. They’re fucking cowards, willing to put the comfort of a small population of their own over the well-being of the entirety of Equestria.” She finished her glass in one swift swig, and I cringed at the idea of doing the same.

“Growing crops on clouds? How does that work?” I asked, perplexed, while the white pegasus poured herself another glass.

“Fuck if I know, I haven’t even been up there.” I could feel my eyebrows furrowing.

“You… Can’t get up there?” I knew I was asking an obvious question, but I genuinely wanted to know, whether I look clueless or not.

“I could try, but I’d just get roasted by their magical energy weapons.” She gave a dry chuckle. “Yeah no, I can’t. Never been up there, never plan on going. Fuckers cast out my mom for saying things they didn’t like.” That’s interesting… I wonder what their internal politics look like if they’re willing to go to such lengths to censor their people. The stable never needed to go to such extents. Usually fines were enough.

“I’m… sorry to hear that, miss,” said Candy. Somehow, she’d already gotten through her glass of whiskey, and was starting to sip mine.

“Well, it’s not like I care. I’d honestly rather live here, no matter how tough it gets, at least I wouldn’t have to feel guilty for fucking over thousands of other ponies.” I was starting to get tired of her swearing. As a matter of fact, I was starting to get tired of her entire attitude.

“But there’s something bugging me,” remarked Candy. “We saw fresh produce in the main hall, how is that even possible? It should be too cold to grow anything, on top of not being sunny enough.”

“It’s part of why power is so scarce here. We have a group of five earth ponies growing crops in greenhouses, but they use up a ton of electricity to run. We’re constantly running into issues with the substations, but the main issue comes from just a supply. The little power we currently have comes from the Hoofer dam, but that thing is half broken, and tryna’ fix it will just getcha radiation poisoning. On top of that, it’s so far north that even getting there is a huge pain in the ass.” She took a large swig directly from the bottle, and I noticed her second glass was already empty. “Hic!”

“Are you sure you should be drinking this much?” hesitantly asked Candy, worry apparent in her voice. Why was she concerned for this annoying, loudmouth pegasus? Well, if anything happened to her, we would lose our source of regional news, but I doubted she would die from drinking too much. She looked much too used to this to accidentally overdo it. Was I judging her unfairly simply because she could drink so much of this gross stuff?

“I’ll be fiiiiine.” Yes, I was judging her, but I doubted it was unfairly. Now, even I was able to notice the effects of the alcohol on her. Her speech sounded slurred. If I remembered correctly, drinking large amounts of it made your brain work slower, and I just couldn’t understand why a pony would willingly subject themself to both the taste and the effect. I’d get it if it at least tasted good, but as it stood, I was utterly and completely confused by adults, once again. Candy didn’t seem to love it as much, as she only drank small sips of the stuff, but she didn’t seem to hate it as much as I did, either.

I lost track of their conversation as I was distracted by the room instead. It was full of all types of ponies, as well as a griffin, but Airwaves was the only pegasus, partially confirming what she’d mentioned earlier. There were a few large earth pony stallions that looked strong enough to give Candy a run for her bits—or caps, I suppose—but most people here were scrawny and short. In the crowd, a dim grey unicorn with a green mane caught my eye. He wasn’t nearly as thin as everypony else in the room, and while he was only as tall as the average pony in the room, he seemed to stand above the entire room. He had an aura of nobility to him, reminiscent of Mother, yet didn’t seem haughty, only slightly arrogant. I turned my attention to the rest of the ponies in the saloon.

As I looked through the small crowd, I recognised some of the merchants from earlier, and it got me thinking. What were all these ponies doing here? Not the bar specifically, but I couldn’t tell why New Detrot of all places. Was there no other option? What were their occupations?

The two at my table had momentarily stopped their chat, and I asked, “What kind of place is New Detrot? Who comes around here?” I hoped she was still functional enough to answer this. Given that I’d only zoned out for at most five minutes, I dared hope she was.

“Mostly merchants and prospectors~” she replied in a sing-song voice. What was wrong with this mare? “Ujually there’s much less ponies ‘ere, but with the cold a lot of them are staying over. S’good for business.” Oh great, now she wasn’t even trying to sound normal anymore. “Gust lets ponies trade safely here, and in exchange they pay a small tax. It’s win-win. We also make money from the local inn and the bar. Almost everypony in the region has to pass through here at shome point.” She was moving her head back and forth, seemingly amused. Was she enjoying the loss of balance? Was that even a symptom of alcohol intoxication?

Then, it was Candy’s turn to ask a question, “How do you get by, by the way?” Wasn’t her job to be the news mare? Or did she not get paid to do that?

“Oh, I work directly for Gusht~ He says it’s good for business to help ponies stay safe. I’m glad I get to do it, ‘cause I love my job, and I’d do it regardless of the capzzzzz.”

I lost myself in thoughts again, catching bits and pieces of other conversations. I felt ever so slightly lightheaded and suspected it was from the tiny amount of alcohol I’d drunk. Then, I noticed two stallions walking towards our table. The larger of the two approached Candy. “Good evening, missy. I noticed you across the room, and I gotta say, you’re lookin’ mighty fine. You wanna get outta here and have some fun?”

Candy looked surprised, and for a second even shocked, but she still replied with her usual soft and gentle voice, “No, but thank you for the offer.”

The other stallion, shorter but just as muscular as the first told him, in what appeared to be an attempt at whispering, “Try the turkey, she looks hammered enough that she’d fuck a chair.”

Airwaves, obviously, had heard that comment and decided to reply, “Don’t even fucking think about it, you walking pile of bloatsprite vomit.” How did she suddenly sound infinitely more collected? She didn’t even sound this sober when she was sober. The larger of the two hit the other in the ribs with his hoof, causing him to yelp and massage his side. I could almost feel the pain in my own rib, except mine was actually broken. The shorter stallion, once he was done complaining and whining, turned to me. “What about you, eh?”

Candy turned to him and spoke before I even had a chance to understand what he wanted. “Touch her, and I’m crushing your fucking skull.” Her voice was ice cold and sharp like a razor, sending shivers through my spine. The stallion started trembling and walking backwards, terrified. I couldn’t blame him; I was taken aback as well, and I knew she was on my side.

Suddenly, I heard a stallion clear his throat, and I noticed the bartender, Moonshine, standing next to our table. “Is there a problem here?” he asked, a hoof on the shotgun attached by a string to his neck.

My friend replied to him, her voice amicable and warm again, “No, of course not. We were simply telling these gentlecolts we weren’t interested in their generous offer.” This kindness, combined with her previous threat, and the way she’d protected me in the metro all came together in a single, cozy feeling. For the first time in years, I felt safe.

She turned back to face our pegasus acquaintance, whose expression was frozen in admirative shock. The unicorn just smiled, returning to her usual self. Candy started talking about their previous topic—mostly just complaining about the cold, really—but I could tell Airwaves was not listening. The petite mare was clearly too busy just staring at my friend. Was this what Arcane had looked like during her first day at work? Or was I misreading things?

“So, what can you tell us about the region, Miss Airwaves?” wondered my companion. I was glad the discussion returned to an interesting topic.

Her conversation partner slurred out her reply, “Weeeell… There’s not as many ponies living here as there are evewywhere else. Everywhere. ‘Cause it’s so hard and hard to survive up here.”

Candy raised an eyebrow. “Then how come ponies live here at all?”

“Shpeshifically because there’s so few ponies here.” She paused and contemplated her glass for a second, clearly considering another drink. “The pre-bomb settlementz here are so common for some reason. But that means that we get lots of very small, very isolated communities all throughout the region. New Detrot is actchually the biggest non-zombie settlement in the entirety of midnorthern Equestria.”

“That’s a lot of information to take in at once,” admitted Candy. “How common are these settlements?”

“I dunno, if you go north or west or south-east of here along the metro tracks, you’ll see small suburbs every few hours. I wonder what those damn pre-bomb ponies thought. How would it be convenient to just spread out over an entire region like this? I don’t get it. And why did they even call their train tracks metro lines? More than half of it is above ground!” ranted the pegasus.

Before I could stop myself, I started explaining, “Actually, I can answer that. You see, in the late Celestian era, the Equestrian economy boomed, and along with that, so did the manufacturing industry. Over a few years, a lot of companies started outsourcing their production needs to Detrot, which created an incredibly large amount of jobs in the industrial area, which quickly started outgrowing the residential areas.” Why couldn’t I stop myself? This was so much unlike me. Sure, I would have loved to have them recognise my knowledge, but monologuing about history was out of character for me.

I paused to take a sip of water. “Because of this, ponies started living a bit further away, since rent was much cheaper, and transport didn’t take much longer. Metro lines were established, and this trend continued. Living further away from the city was both more comfortable and cheaper for a lot of ponies. The region only really stopped growing when the coal shortages began, and then so many ponies lost their jobs that moving away was difficult. Owning property that no one wanted to buy left them stranded in the region. The region only partly recovered when armed conflict started, and manufacturing was needed as part of the war effort.” I still couldn’t comprehend why I had gone on this tangent. I likely made them mad by doing this.

No, Candy wouldn’t get mad. But she might be disappointed. I wanted to look to my left, and gauge her reaction, but couldn’t; my gaze stayed on the pegasus mare in front of me. She looked… impressed? Not angry, not even annoyed. Just… impressed. I finally managed to look at Candy, who looked proud. Had I done the right thing? I’d just been bragging, hadn’t I? I’d interrupted adults with my silly ramblings, and I should face consequences… right?

Airwaves stared awkwardly, then coughed in a half-hearted attempt at concealing her next word. “Nerd.” I was instantly furious and wanted to challenge her on those words. Instead, I just looked down at the table in shame.

Candy saved me from my misery and spoke up, making me turn towards her. “You know, I’m pretty sure I had that in school as well, but I don’t remember any of it. I’m actually impressed at how good you are at remembering stuff like that,” approved the unicorn, smiling.

“So this is normal knowledge for stable folk?” wondered Airwaves, taken aback. So now that Candy was impressed, this was suddenly impressive knowledge? Before long, their dialogue returned to things I didn’t care about.

As I once again lost track of their conversation, I started looking around the room again. I couldn’t tell what compelled me to—I’d seen everything there was to see. However, something was odd about my movements, they didn’t feel like they were truly my own. Was I imagining things? Was this related to the alcohol I’d drunk? Was it maybe the combination of alcohol and sugar rush? Were my movements influenced by the drink, or was it my perception of them that was altered? It really was hard to tell, but this almost felt like that memory talisman. Unlike that, however, those movements were still mine, just… odd.

I walked out of the bar, and into the night, following behind Candy. Feeling the sugar crash, I’d told her I was sleepy, and she decided it was time to leave. By now, my movements felt like they weren’t mine at all. My step felt much more hesitant than how I’d normally walked. I was almost hiding behind my older cousin, and seemed to be ready to jump underneath her the moment danger presented itself. Part of me doubted it was simply the alcohol, but I had no other explanation. I wanted to ask Candy or Airwaves, but didn’t manage to open my mouth.

We eventually split up with the pegasus, who took to the air. Half a minute later, I could have sworn I heard her crash into a wall, but Candy didn’t react. Wasn’t any of my business, though I suspected Candy would make it her business if she found out.

As we were slowly trotting to where we’d hidden the cart, I noticed something odd in the corner of my eye. I wanted to turn to it, take another glance. Not that I could look if I wanted to. It was probably nothing.

Moments later, a pony emerged from the shadows, running towards Candy, a large combat knife in his mouth. Immediately after him came another pony, this one coming straight for me, metal bat in his jaw. Within two seconds, I unharnessed my pistol. Within three, I slipped into SATS, queuing three bullets to his head. Within six, his head exploded in a shower of blood and brains. It was during SATS that I’d recognised him as the pony Candy had threatened, the smaller of the two stallions who’d bothered us.

I glanced over to her, and noticed she’d restrained the stallion, despite him being significantly larger than her. With a swift blow to the head she dazed him, kicked the blade away, then ran over to his buddy, presumably to loot his corpse. While the large stallion was down, I took the opportunity to line up a perfect shot through his temple. Candy turned around the second she heard the gunshot. She stared at the puddle of blood flowing from his head, gasping in shock. “Iron! You just killed somepony!” So what? Wasn’t my first kill. I was just defending myself.

“I… wasn’t supposed to?” I faltered, utterly lost.

“No! I incapacitated him, he was no longer a threat!” she scolded, anger and disappointment oozing from her voice.

“B-but he might have been,” I pleaded, at the edge of tears. For some reason, having her angry at me stung more than anything I’d ever felt. The tears started running down my face. “I j-just wanted to help,” I blubbered, no longer trying to contain my emotions.

Her expression softened, and she approached, then hugged me. I cried on her shoulder, while she gently caressed my back. Part of my mind was soothed by the embrace, while another wondered if I could use sadness as a trick to get out of situations in the future. If I pretended well enough, surely.

Then the first part was appalled by my manipulative thoughts. And it was right, if Candy knew what I had just thought, she would hate me.

Footnote:

New Perk: Telekinetic Sense I — Your telekinesis allows you to feel the finer details of the surface of the objects that you pick up in its aura. Additionally, you no longer need to see what you want to reach with your magic—your sense of touch can now work as well. In practice, this means you can spread your telekinesis inside objects.

New Perk: Teleportation ½ — You can teleport! Sort of. You’re able to teleport diagonally straight down, as long as you aren’t carrying too much weight.