Fallout Equestria: Redemption
By: Cooperdawg
Chapter 2: Denial
“Just because you say you got better doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Evergreen, wake up! You know today is the day we have to move on!” a familiar voice called. It was a soft voice that made me feel warm and, despite the world I knew lay just outside, safe. The only word that came to my mind to describe it was Momma. My eyes cracked open, and I saw her standing in the doorway, red mane flowing over her pale cream shoulder and framing her face, drawing my gaze to her eyes which were lit with the joy of still having something good in this harsh world. Her mouth was curled into a knowing smile. We had played this game every time we had to leave.

I squeezed my eyes shut, starting to snore extravagantly. “Can’t. Hear. You,” I said between snores, “Sleeping.”

She chuckled, the sound echoing through the room like spring bells gently waking me from a winter’s hibernation, filling my small heart with the warmth of knowing that this mare loved me above anypony else in the entire world. I heard hoofsteps on the old wooden floor approach my makeshift bed, followed by her warm breath on my ear. “Now, Evergreen, you know what I’ve told you happens to little fillies that sleep too late, right?”

“Nope,” I answered, still snoring. I cracked one eye slightly, waiting for what new invention she would come up with this time to try to frighten me.

“Of course I’ve told you of the Headless Horse. I must have warned you a thousand times!” she said sternly, not quite able to hide the mirth in her voice.

“Never,” I stated adamantly. This one was truly new. Most of the others were variations of the same stories, but always with different twists.

“Well, he comes to little fillies, in their dreams, while they’re sleeping when they should be up and awake and playing in Celestia’s sun. The story goes that he wanders through their dreams, always searching for the pony responsible for him losing his head. If he comes, he will stay until he is sure that the filly doesn’t know who did it, and only then will he move on, but not before cursing the little filly to a whole lifetime of nightmares, in case she should ever find out who ’dun it,” she told me, the words sending shivers down my spine even as a smile spread across my face.

“Momma, you mean who did it!” I laughed, not even pretending to be asleep, “And he couldn’t get me! Not with Daddy and you watching over me!”

“Of course, my little Evergreen, and we will watch over you until you decide to go your own way, whenever that may be,” she answered, “Now come. Get up; we have a long way to go today if we want to make it to Grovedale before nightfall.”

“Okay, Momma,” I sighed, still smiling as I crept to my hooves, my green and brown mane a mess about my face.

Everything blurred and I was standing just inside the gate of Grovedale while a rugged buck in dark barding questioned my parents. I wasn’t even paying attention. Instead, I was wandering around the little space that we were allowed in while my Daddy spoke with the other important pony, chasing the lengthening afternoon shadows.

“I’m sorry, sir, we’re just full up. There’s no more space to live. Had you come here even a month ago I could have given you a shack, but as it is…” he trailed off, looking over his shoulder to the slowly gathering crowd. Newcomers weren’t common here, Daddy had told me, so I had to be on my best behavior, so I was doing my best not to touch anything, except for that shiny rock over there, oh, and that little piece of metal over there. Surely no one would miss that.

“Please, we have a filly!” Momma said, her voice pleading, “We have nowhere else to go. She won’t survive the wasteland, not with the number of gangs increasing.”

The sadness in her voice drew me to her side. I could never stand seeing Momma sad. It seemed to make the sky darker, and the rain fall even harder, as if the entire world became sad with her, and I didn’t like that. “Momma, don’t be sad! Look what I brought you!” I said, holding up the shiny piece of metal I had picked up.

She looked down at me, smiling warmly with her mouth, but it wasn’t reaching her eyes. There, I could see only pain. “Thank you, Evergreen. It’s wonderful.” She took the piece of metal and placed it in one of her saddlebags. The act put a smile back on my face and I wandered away again, but within earshot, as my Daddy always told me!

“How can you deny her a chance at life?” Daddy demanded, “Isn’t that what ponies are supposed to do? Care about each other? Share their homes with a friend in need?”

“But there’s the problem,” the other important pony said, “You ain’t a friend of anypony here. You’re a stranger, and strangers mean trouble. I’m sorry, but you can’t stay. Even the inn is full.”

My father snorted, an ugly sound he only made when he was either very frightened, or angry at me. I turned my head in alarm and looked at him.

“Fine, but know that if the worst should happen, the blood of an innocent filly is on your hooves!” he snapped, then turned to where I was standing, “Come on, Evergreen, we need to go!”

He sounded angry, so I listened as quickly as I could, racing over to his side. I hoped he wasn’t angry with me. “I’m sorry, Daddy! I was trying to be good!” I begged as I arrived, skidding to a stop in front of him.

“You were just fine, my dear. I’m not angry with you. Let’s go.”

We stepped outside the gate and made it no more than fifty steps when I heard something that sounded like thunder, except it wasn’t raining, and Daddy fell down, a trickle of red coming from a hole that had appeared in his chest.

I was instantly at his side, trying to help him up as he gasped for breath, but my filly’s mind didn’t realize that he was already too far gone to save. He turned weakly to face me as Momma ran up to his other side, cradling his head in her hooves, muttering ‘no’ under her breath repeatedly. I thought I heard the shout of ‘raiders’ come from the town we had just left.

“Get back to the town, Evergreen. They’ll keep you safe,” Daddy rasped over the sound of thundering hooves, coming both from behind and in front of us. Several ponies from the town surrounded us, guarding us with their bodies as more thunder echoed across the wasteland.

“No, I wanna help!” I shouted back, fighting against my fear of the sounds, “Come on! Get up!” I tugged at him, so much larger and heavier than me that I may as well have been trying to pry open a Stable door.

He reached up weakly with a hoof and placed it on my head, drawing me close. “I know you want to help,” he whispered with all the strength he had left, “Just remember that…” Another thunderclap tore through the wasteland and I looked up just in time to see a spray of red spread across my vision, spattering me and making everything go black.

I woke with a start, soaked in sweat. A moment later and I was trembling as I relived the memory again, as vividly as if it had just happened yesterday. I could feel the spray of blood on my face as a raider sniper blew my mother’s head apart mere inches away from my own. I felt the last breath escape my father’s broken body as the town guard’s dragged me away from his corpse. Another moment and I was sobbing for the first time in years, albeit quietly. That had been the first thing I had practiced not long after that event. No one liked an overly emotional filly, no matter the horrors she had experienced.

Emotions I had long thought dead flowed through me. How long had it been since I had felt grief and loss? How long had it been since I had actually been sad over the death of anypony? What terrified me was that I couldn’t remember the last time I had wept with grief.

That dream had come back to me for some reason, for the first time in years. As I lay trembling, the tears streaming from my eyes, I tried to figure out why. The last time I had had the dream was just after I had killed that Stable pony, and it had rendered me helpless, without motivation to do anything but wallow in misery. Another thought struck me a moment later, like a bucket of ice water to the face. I had just lost everything I had worked for in the last three years, and that dream had been the first time I had lost it all.

But something had been different this time. Something was missing that I couldn’t clearly remember from the other dreams, or even from the memory itself, as much as it was etched into my mind. Those last words my father had spoken to me, the last words he had ever spoken, would not be called to mind. They stood at the edge of my thoughts, tempting me with something I had forgotten, something vital about myself, but no matter how hard I tried, and no matter how much I forced myself to relive that memory, those words would not be summoned.

The effort of trying to remember left me feeling hollow and violated, is if some part of who I was had been torn away from me, leaving a gaping wound in its wake. I was shocked even farther when I realized that I had felt this way for a long time. But there were no more tears left to shed, and with no other way to release my grief, I struggled to my hooves and wandered away from our camp, out of the burnt-out home that we had used as cover for the night. As I crested the hill nearby, the sky was just beginning to lighten as the sun rose behind the cloud cover. What I would have given just to see the sun rise. I’m sure everything would be just fine if I could just see that orb of light crawl its way across the sky, spreading its warmth to all who lived in this dark and dreary existence.

Instead, I simply sat in silence, watching as the gloomy dawn chased away the shadows. Unconsciously, I reached for my journal, feeling the need to add to the cryptic words I had written just two days ago, when everything had still been normal, before I had been cast back out into the wasteland.

My spirits sank even farther when I couldn’t find it. I hadn’t had time to grab it during the fighting, so it was still sitting on my desk in the RV, that is, if nopony had grabbed it since we left. Somehow, its loss seemed symbolic, reminding me of how little I remembered about myself. That booked contained everything from my life, starting from the day it had been given to me by my mother a mere two weeks before the event. I hadn’t read some of those pages from my past in years. The gloom of the sky did little to chase away my grief.

Before long, I felt somepony come up beside me. I glanced to my right and saw Crosswire staring out to the eastern horizon I had been so intently watching, completely oblivious to my inner turmoil.

“We headed that way?” he asked gruffly. For him, life was simple. I was in charge, and so I decided where we went and what we did. He wouldn’t argue, because he had chosen his life to be led like that. I envied him the simplicity.

“Maybe in a while,” I answered, “Our goal is still more to the north. I want to make for Grovedale. I might get lucky and they’ll remember me from before… everything.”

Crosswire noticed my hesitation and shot me a glance. “That so? Well, I could certainly use some more civilized company. Raiders are all well and good, but they don’t know shit about keeping an engine running or fixing an energy weapon, or barely even how to fix a regular gun, now that I think about it!” he laughed. That was typical Crosswire. He was a raider in everything but intelligence, though I had never gotten him to explain why he was so much smarter than the average thug.

I chuckled along with him. “It would be nice to be able to have a normal conversation. And to not have to hide anything anymore,” I answered with a glance to my barding. My cutie mark was still covered, and my utility suit was coated in more dried blood than I cared to see from the fight the day before.

“Eeyup,” the buck agreed. He remained silent for a few moments longer, still watching the horizon, then turned back to the house, “We should probably pack up and head out. Wouldn’t be surprised if another gang already has us targeted us as a potential mark.”

“What would they take?” I scoffed as I followed him back, “The best thing we’ve got is a few meager supplies and my revolver. Not to be mean, but your submachine gun is barely holding together as it is!”

He floated the old weapon up to his face for a close inspection. “True enough, but I’m not the one you need to convince, Ever,” he said, “It’s them, if they’re there. You know how it works: any traveler is a mark.”

I couldn’t think of a response as I packed up my belongings. It didn’t take long, as there wasn’t much to take. The last thing I shoved into a pocket was that bizarre crystal. I had been up most of the night staring at it, trying to figure out what exactly it was. My Pipbuck was useful in naming and valuing things, but it tended to be very vague when it came to some things. Pick up a surviving book from before the war, for example, and it would simply call it a “Pre-war book”, not “Starswirl the Bearded’s Treatise on Magic” or “101 ways to prepare Apples”. Sometimes, that was simply infuriating.

“I’m surprised you kept that thing,” Crosswire stated as we departed, making our way out of the foothills and into the plains that had once supported the city of Seaddle. “I remember you calling it useless, and you aren’t known for hanging on to something just because you think it looks pretty.”

So unlike what I was like as a filly, I thought, still hung up on my dream. I hesitated in answering his question, not knowing how much I wanted to reveal. I really had no reason to lie, but in a raider gang, you never gave away too much information, or you’d be betrayed in a heartbeat. Old habits died hard, I guess.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, fine. You do what you do for your own reasons. It’s not any of my business,” he said after a small silence, retreating back into his shell and returning back to his role as a lackey in a raider gang.

“No, you’re right,” I argued as we skirted a small pool of standing water that made my Pipbuck start to click at me, reacting to the radiation lingering in the water. “I kept it because it is much more valuable than Crackshot thought it was. Problem is that it’s probably only valuable to a few certain ponies, and I’m pretty sure most won’t do nice things with it.”

“And since when does being nice mean anything to us, boss?” Crosswire asked, snorting in disdain, “We’re fucking raiders, the damned definition of bad. Selling that thing to the highest bidder is almost required, barring we don’t kill the bastard for his caps first.”

“It’s mattered ever since we got kicked out of the camp,” I snapped, “Face it, Crosswire, we’re not raiders anymore. We don’t have a gang, we barely have any supplies, and the one pony who had the skills to keep us on our hooves ran off simply ‘cause I’m not a nice pony!”

My comment stopped Crosswire dead in his tracks, forcing me to come up short so as to not leave him behind. “Fuck, I never thought of it that way,” he grumbled, spitting into the dust, “Everything I’ve known is gone, isn’t it? The lifestyle, the supplies, even the odd pieces of machinery the search parties would bring back. We really aren’t anything anymore, are we, Evergreen?”

It was the first time he had called me by my full name without mocking me. Instead, his voice was fearful. I guess I wasn’t the only one who feared the unknown. “Naw, we’re something alright,” I answered, “We’re wastelanders know.”

“Fuck. I hate wastelanders.”

We kept walking, making our way between the low rises that couldn’t be considered hills when compared to even the smallest of the hillocks from the foothills of the mountains. Even though we could easily see over the top of those rises, we didn’t walk over them. In the mountains, going higher than was necessary often got you noticed by rival gangs. Even as a wastelander, it was a wise strategy to stick to.

We journeyed in silence, each lost in our own thoughts as we struggled to come to grips with our new reality. The hardest concept for me to grasp was that I was no longer the predator. I was now the prey, and I was struggling to shift my thinking into that form. I was still watching the horizon around us for targets, not for threats. I still thought that I had an entire gang of seasoned, not to mention brutal, fighters behind me.

After a few hours of this silent slogging, with nothing more exciting crossing our path but a few radhogs that quickly learned it was smarter to leave us alone, the walls of Grovedale became visible in the distance. Some ponies forgot how truly empty the wasteland could be, and the section we happened to be traveling through didn’t have a whole lot of appeal for travelers, not like the regions to the east and west, where the wildlife still existed in some semblance of normalcy and there were still remains of civilization.

After spotting it, the town quickly grew larger until its walls were looming above us and the guard ponies were staring down at us with hard eyes, weapons pointed not directly at us, but definitely in our general direction. I returned their hard stares with one of my own. I wasn’t given to acting helpless, even if there was nothing I could do to survive should they choose to open fire.

“Stop right there, or we will fire!” One of the guards demanded. It was a unicorn mare floating a simple bolt-action rifle in front of her. It looked like it could be in much better condition. The town’s guards had fallen into disrepair; I still remembered a time when all of their weapons were well-maintained and they held careful watches. Now, everything down to their barding was haggard, and it looked like this particular mare had been awake for far too long, and tired ponies had unstable trigger-reflexes.

As demanded, I stopped dead, eyes trained on the mare who had spoken. “Who are you and what do you want in Grovedale? And why in Celestia’s name are you covered in blood?” she asked harshly, swinging the rifle slightly closer to us.

I carefully weighed my options before answering. Give too much away and the guard would probably shoot me out of principle, but if I revealed too little, they probably wouldn’t believe me. “We were attacked yesterday, while we were in the mountains,” I explained, gesturing to the bulge in my barding that covered my bandaged side, “We came down here for medical help, as well as supplies. Damn raiders took almost everything we had. We barely escaped with our hides intact.”

The guard narrowed her eyes at me, as though she didn’t quite believe me. I could almost hear the trigger of the rifle squeezing. I hadn’t lied, not really. We had been attacked, and they had taken everything from me, and I did need help. I just hadn’t told them the whole truth. “You didn’t tell me who you were,” she snapped, bringing the rifle around so it was pointing right at me.

“I’m Evergreen,” I said, hoping the mare would either not know my name (I didn’t recognize her and had spent some time in Grovedale growing up after… the event), or that she would recognize it for who I was before I had left. “My friend is Crosswire.”

“Evergreen?! Ya’ll have got to be fucking kiddin’ me!” A buck exclaimed from behind the wall. A moment later, a very familiar face appeared on the wall beside the mare with the rifle. It was Just Law, the mayor of the town, and he was not happy. “Ah told ya to leave and ne’er come back, ya murdering bitch! Ah should have Lighteye here shoot ya fer daring to come this close again!”

“I know, Just Law,” I answered carefully, “and I wouldn’t have come here had I had any other choice. Believe it or not, I wasn’t lying. We were attacked in the mountains, and we are almost out of supplies. By tonight, we’ll be completely out of clean water, and by tomorrow, we won’t have any food. We have absolutely no medical supplies at all, and I have a gunshot wound in my side. If you don’t help us, we’ll die out here.”

He snorted at me. “Yer not telling the whole truth, are ya, Evergreen? How ‘bout ya tell Lighteye who ya really are. Then we’ll see how she reacts to ya’ll coming back here to our town. I can see ya were attacked, but it weren’t by surprise, I reckon.”

I knew that getting angry at the buck wouldn’t help us, and we really needed those supplies, by my rage often got the better of me. This was one of those times. “Fine, you want to know the truth, Just Law, here it is. I was a goddamn raider till one of my best shots betrayed me yesterday. Killed more than half of my gang ‘cause they were dumb enough to stay loyal to me, then tried to catch me alive to keep as some trophy. Fucker should have been smarter than that, since he probably bled out after I almost shot his leg off. Now I’m just a wounded pony dragging myself through the wasteland hoping that others will be kind enough to help me. I’ll tell you right now, Just Law: if you deny us, we are dead. There’s no other way to cut it. Are you ready to be a murderer?”

As soon as the words were out I knew I had made a mistake. The hardening of his face was an instant clue that I probably wouldn’t survive the week. And I had just been thinking that there was a chance at a better life for me.

“Killing a raider ain’t murder, Evergreen. Weren’t ya the one that told me that all them years ago?” Just Law drawled, “Now should Ah have Lighteye see ya out or can ya do it yerself? Out of respect fer yer folks, may they be happy in the Beyond, Ah ain’t gonna order yer death, but if ya stick around, Ah won’t hesitate to have ya shot.”

“We’re leaving,” I snapped, “I’m not going to go out that way. I’ll probably be dead by the end of the week, but I won’t die here with a bullet through my head.”

As Crosswire and I turned to leave the town behind, I heard Just Law call after me. “Yer folks would be mighty disappointed to see what ya’ve become, Evergreen. Ah’m glad they didn’t live to long enough to see yer fall.”

I was barely able to keep myself from turning, pulling out my gun, and putting a bullet square between his eyes. If only my accuracy was that good from this range. If only my Pipbuck were working properly. I had heard about some of the functions that the thing was supposed to have, like a spell that stopped time and let a pony line up the perfect shot. Celestia be damned, but I could think of a lot of uses for a spell like that one.

Gritting my teeth, I continued to walk. I wasn’t going to let a comment that I knew was meant to piss me off jeopardize my chance at life. If we were lucky, we would be able to salvage enough supplies to survive until we found a settlement that would trade with us. It wasn’t possible that my reputation could sweep across the entire Seaddle region. Other ponies may know of me, but there simply wasn’t any way that they could know me.

I felt the guard ponies watching our every step as the town slowly grew smaller behind us. Celestia only knew how long it would be until I could step a hoof back into that town again. It certainly didn’t feel like they’d let me in anytime soon, regardless of the fact that I had basically been raised there.

My head was hanging low when we finally stopped to discuss our next move. The walls of Grovedale had just slipped out of sight over the horizon, but the weight of them looming over me was still hanging heavy on my heart. Crosswire was giving me an odd look as we sat and finished off the last of our clean water.

“You’ve been acting very different,” he offered after shaking out the last few precious drops from his canteen. It was one of the very few times I had heard him take an interest in somepony other than himself. “Not at all like you used to back in camp. You feeling all right, boss?”

I looked over at him, certain that the depression I was feeling was evidently clear on my face. From his stunned expression, I guessed I was right. “I’m just realizing everything I could have done differently,” I said. It wasn’t that I had changed. Given half a reason to, I would still blow the head off of any pony who messed with me, but the wasteland, especially the experience at Grovedale, were forcing me to relive memories and remember some choices that had been extremely painful. Chances were that by this time tomorrow, I would be back to being the same old Evergreen that Crosswire was used to. “I’ll be fine, the last couple days have just been a shock.”

He nodded, though whether out of pity or sympathy, I couldn’t tell, but then his face hardened and he seemed to retreat back into himself. “Well, that’s your business. Where we headed next?” That was odd. He had just shown himself to be concerned, then locked up as though he hadn’t realized what he had been saying.

Well, that would be a mystery for another time. Right now, my priority was survival. “We need supplies, and I mean more than just food and water. Medical supplies would be incredibly useful, both for ourselves and for trade, and I could definitely use a healing potion. We could both use some extra guns, or at least some spare parts for the ones we have,” I said.

“Makes sense. Any idea where we can find any of that? I’m not too familiar with this part of the wasteland. Spent most of my childhood to the south, near Mt. Hoof. This is the farthest north I’ve ever been,” he said.

I nodded thoughtfully, reaching back in my mind for anything that could give us a lead on some supplies. An idea slowly came to me. “If nopony has gotten to it yet, there should still be an Ironshod Firearms factory around here that hasn’t been thoroughly salvaged. At least, it hadn’t been the last time I was near there. Places like that usually have a cafeteria and an infirmary, so we’d be able to pick up some food and medical supplies, as well as have access to some fairly good quality firearms.”

“What about a caravan?” he countered, “Hit the right one and we’ll get everything we need, without needing to risk our hides against unknown dangers. With the caravans, at least, we know what we’re facing.”

He had a fair point, and had he offered that idea a week ago, I would have agreed without hesitation. But today, I wasn’t so sure. The more we travelled, the more I suspected we would come to rely on those caravans for trade ourselves. Taking one out to loot was a short term solution, and we could no longer afford to think short term. “Only if it becomes absolutely necessary,” I answered, “There’s only the two of us now, and most caravans have at least that many guards. The plains down here make it incredibly difficult to hit them without them seeing us coming from a mile away, so an ambush won’t really work. A surprise attack from up close could be effective, but there would simply be too many unknowns to be worth it.”

A shadow of disappointment passed over Crosswire’s face. “Guess that makes sense,” he grumbled, “Fuck, from successful raider to bottom-sucking salvager in ten seconds flat. I hate the fucking wasteland.”

“At least you’re still alive. It’s more than most ex-raiders can say,” I said with a grin, “Now come on. If I remember correctly, the factory is in this direction.” I returned my canteen to my saddlebags and started trotting in a northwesterly direction. Crosswire grumbled some more, but fell into step behind me. This transition was probably just as hard on the tough buck as it was on me; he was just better at hiding it.

In the end, I had misjudged the direction by enough to get us to wander aimlessly around the wasteland for a few hours as I tried to reorient myself, cursing my Pipbuck the entire time. The map may work, but it only showed extremely basic information, like a notation for downtown Seaddle, or one for Grovedale, which had existed in some form at the same location before the war, but nothing else would come up, not even the major new centers of civilization, like Metro.

By the time we finally found the old factory, night had fallen, bringing with it the kind of rain that falls just hard enough to be annoying, but light enough that our visibility wasn’t too badly hampered. The building towered over us, rising a full five stories above the rest of the wasteland. The windows, all six of them that we could see, had been blasted out and the walls were coated in two hundred years’ worth of grime and dirt.

“Let’s not waste any time,” I announced as a trotted up to the main entrance and kicked open the door, instantly setting off an alarm that resonated through my entire body and was probably loud enough to be heard all the way across the ocean in Canterlot. My previously empty E.F.S. began to light up with red bars as the alarm swept through the facility, activating the security systems that had probably been dormant since the bombs fell.

“Fuck! Get those damn alarms shut off, Crosswire,” I shouted as I pulled out Hammer. The grey unicorn dashed through the door to the reception desk that sat in the center of the entrance room. Once there, he started working on the terminal, typing furiously while he searched for the password to access the system.

“Make sure nothing interrupts me!” he shouted back, then focused entirely on the screen in front of him.

I walked up beside him, looking from corner to corner, trying to locate every red bar that I could. There must have been at least three dozen of them, but I honestly had no idea where they were. This was the kind of situation I hated. They could be on any one of five different floors, rather than clustered right outside the room I was in, and there was no way to be sure of where they were.

While I searched for targets, I got a good look at the reception area. It was mostly bare, with just the main desk in the center and a few chairs strewn about whose purpose I couldn’t discern. Why would a weapons factory have a waiting room, anyway?

Luckily, there were only two directions I had to watch: a large set of double doors directly across from the main entrance, and a small side door that probably led to some back offices. “How long is that going to take, Crosswire? I’d rather not be stuck in here when the welcoming party arrives!” I demanded, eyes flitting from door to door. Some of the red bars were starting to move, shifting about my vision at odd intervals as they navigated through the depths of the building towards us.

“It’ll take as long as it takes, and asking me isn’t going to speed it up!” he shot back angrily, “Now just watch the damn doors!”

I obediently ignored him, instead focusing on the large double doors. If anything was going to attack us, it was going to come from there. I was absolutely sure of that, so, of course, I was wrong.

The side door swung open and I heard a monotonous tin voice come from that direction. “Zebra attack confirmed. Lethal force authorized.”

I turned to face the attacker as a thin red light streaked past me, filling the air around me with the smell of ozone. The protect-a-pony rolled into the room, firing its laser in every direction. It must have been deactivated for so long that some of its hardware was starting to break down.

I brought Hammer up, took a half second to line up the shot, and pulled the trigger. The bullet flew exactly where I wanted, striking the robot square in the glowing visor where a normal pony’s eyes would be. The visor shattered and the mechanical voice slowed to a stop. The robot sat silently, seemingly dead. I fired another round into the visor, just to be sure. You never knew when these robots were well and truly dead.

“I’m in!” Crosswire announced, “Now just to access the security system...” He fell silent again and returned to his work, his face glowing green with the light from the terminal.

The alarm continued to sound and I slid over to him and nudged his flank. “Anytime now, Crosswire,” I grumbled, “Any longer, and this room is going to be a damn party for those buckets of bolts.”

A moment later, with a loud thudding, the alarms fell silent. The sudden silence was overwhelming. I could hear every little creak in the old structure, and a lot more grinding of gears than I was comfortable with, not to mention the heavy beating of my heart. The army of protect-a-ponies was still coming. “Thanks for getting rid of the sound, now can you shut those damn things off!”

“That wasn’t me,” Crosswire stated with a strained voice, “The speakers blew out. Two hundred years without maintenance. I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did. But this fucking terminal doesn’t connect to the security mainframe. It’s just admin crap. There’s still a silent alarm going through the building’s systems that’s keeping the protect-a-ponies active. So we either need to get to the mainframe to shut them down, or destroy them all.” He looked up to face me, concern written into his features. He wasn’t sure we could pull this off.

I agreed with him, but we didn’t have much of a choice. “Can you pull up a floor plan? Getting to the mainframe sounds easier than destroying three dozen robots trying to vaporize us.”

“Uh, I’ll see what I can pull up,” he said, turning back to the terminal. A few moments later, as the grinding of centuries-old protect-a-ponies steadily grew in volume, he stepped back from the terminal. “Got it. I know where to go.”

“Good. I’ll draw them off. Get there and shut them down! I know nothing about these computers; that’s your specialty. What floor is it on?” I asked, quickly sliding a couple of bullets into the used chambers of Hammer.

“Third floor, northwest corner. I’ll wait for you there. You sure you can handle this?” he asked, giving me a concerned look. His life was in my hooves after all.

I couldn’t help but to laugh. “I’m Evergreen, feared boss of the most badass raider gang in Seaddle, if not the whole damn wasteland! Only reason I lost yesterday was cause sompony who shouldn’t have gotten involved in the fight jumped me! I got this!” I wouldn’t tell him how hard my heart was hammering in my chest. I was absolutely terrified of what we faced. Two robots I could handle, even six wouldn’t be that tough, but anything over than that, and I seriously doubted how long I could keep them busy.

“All right. If you’re sure,” Crosswire said, obviously not convinced, as he checked his submachine gun.

“We’ll be fine. I’ll run in first and draw them off to the southeast corner, on either this floor or the next one up. I’ll try to find some place to hole up until you can shut them down,” I said, “Give me thirty seconds, then get up there.”

Crosswire nodded and racked the bolt of his weapon, chambering a round. “Let’s do it, then.

I grinned and marched up to the double doors. This was either going to work perfectly, or it was going to hurt a lot. I was praying for the former. I took a moment to breathe, gathering in my fear and focusing it, using it to keep myself alert and ready. Only a foolish pony completely disregarded fear. It existed to help us survive, and so I would use it for that purpose.

With one solid kick, the doors swung open, revealing a factory floor that had not survived the last two centuries well. With my first glance, I noticed several of the catwalks had broken free and were dangling from the ceiling on their cables, and debris littered the floor. More pressing, however, were the half dozen protect-a-ponies converging on us.

I leapt forward, firing Hammer as I went. The powerful rounds from the revolver shattered the robot’s armor wherever it struck, leaving my targets lying in a dead, sparking heap. Unfortunately, it only held six rounds. By the time I got past them, only two were destroyed, and I was down to a single round.

One of the robots rolled up behind me while I searched for a way out, and I felt a lance of heat on my rump, quickly followed by a searing pain. I swore and twisted, bringing Hammer to bear. I sent the last round into the offending robot’s visor, cutting off some vital systems and killing it. Now I was stuck in a room with an empty gun and three hostile pony-shaped robots.

I spun around in confusion, dodging the lances of energy coming from the protect-a-ponies, searching for a way out. I finally found it against the far wall. A narrow staircase led up from the factory floor to a piece of intact catwalk that might let me onto the second floor. I dashed towards it, bucking one of the robots aside as I went. My strike didn’t take it out, but I did succeed in knocking it over, and since the things were on wheels, it should be out of the fight for good.

The stairs creaked loudly under me as I ascended, making me think that they could break away at any second and send me tumbling back down to the factory floor. A fall from this height wouldn’t be fatal, but it would definitely hurt, and would probably give the damn robots enough time to finish me off. I paused as I reached the landing, but none of the robots looked to be up here with me, yet. I turned to look back down, thinking that the stairs would prevent them from following me.

To my surprise, one of the protect-a-ponies still on its hooves (wheels?) approached the base of the staircase, and its base shifted on some unseen system to let it roll up the staircase. Even worse, the robot I had knocked over had some sort of levitation talisman in it that lifted it up and set it back on its wheels, where it promptly whirled around and started shooting at me.

“Oh that simply isn’t fair!” I shouted. Damn things even couldn’t stay out of the fight when they were supposed to. I quickly reloaded Hammer, and realized that that pile of ammo that had seemed so large when I had first picked it up was dwindling down to almost nothing amazingly quickly. I had maybe four reloads left, then I would be back to using my .45. I was not looking forward to that prospect.

Once my weapon was reloaded, and the first robot was just reaching the landing, I turned and ran along the catwalk that thankfully led to a door to the second floor. I paused at the door, remembering the few grenades that were still in my saddlebags. I spat Hammer into its holster and pulled out a grenade with a blue band around the center. Spark grenades would make short work of these things. I pulled the stem and tossed it towards the staircase I had come up.

It detonated a moment later in a shower of sparks and lightning, frying every single component of the protect-a-ponies, which caused the one on the landing to topple over and the other two on the stairs to fall back down to the main floor. Three kills with one grenade; I could do much worse than that.

And I would need to. As I kicked the door to the second floor open, I was faced with eight more of the tenacious robots. “You have got to be kidding me!” I shouted as I pulled out Hammer again. My first two shots went into the visor of the robot closest to me, knocking it out of commission. I used its sparking hulk as a platform, jumping off of its back to leap over the other seven. Two more rounds and a second protect-a-pony was knocked out, a pair of holes through its torso. I kept the last two rounds in reserve as I ran into a room full of cubicles.

The six robots followed after me, all shouting some form of ‘Stop, zebra scum!’, firing their lasers after me, and mostly missing. The few that hit me hurt terribly, but to stop was to die, so I kept running, hoping that the mad dash hadn’t turned me around and that I was leading them away from the corner of the building where the security mainframe was.

I turned a corner and nearly ran into four more protect-a-ponies, all of which were facing in my direction. Without thinking, I fired my last two rounds, but managed to only hit with one, and even then, it was a glancing blow that did little damage. I swore and tried to backpedal, but the sound of the six robots following me quickly gave me an argument against that. My only saving grace was a door that leapt out at me from the corner of my eye. I leapt towards it, not caring if it led to a bottomless pit. That would be a better end then to be vaporized by a few robots that couldn’t tell a pony from a zebra.

The door opened back into the factory floor, but on a different catwalk than the one I had used before. I followed the path I was on, mostly because I didn’t have any other choice, running for my life from the grinding of gears following me. Halfway across, I came across one of the sections that had collapsed, leaving a ten foot gap between where I was and where the catwalk continued. I didn’t have time to hesitate, so I simply leapt out into the void, praying to Celestia that I was in good enough shape to make the jump.

I landed heavily on my chest, rear legs dangling over the factory floor, fifteen feet below me. I scrambled up onto the catwalk and started running again, just as laser beams started to fly around me. I dodged around as well as I could, before finally making it through a door back into the offices, where I collided with a solid wall of metal.

Hammer flew from my mouth and out of sight. I didn’t even see what direction it had gone in. I was too busy shaking the stars from my sight and trying to identify what I had run into. Shockingly, the mass of metal moved, shifting around to stare at me with an angry red visor. I realized I was in a lot of trouble as I finally saw the red bar in my vision that pointed to this behemoth.

“Prepare to be incinerated!” it announced, bringing up an arm that ended in a nozzle with a flame flickering before it.

An angry red glow came to life from the inside of the nozzle, but I wasn’t about to wait to see what came out. I rolled to the side as a sheet of flame shot past me, pulling the air from my lungs in the back blast. I used the seconds I had bought to pull out my .45 and level it at the thing’s head.

I pulled the trigger and groaned as the robot’s thick armor deflected the round. It slowly turned to face me again, but I started moving, running back into the offices to get away. “Anytime now, Crosswire!” I shouted out, using what little breath I had managed to recover.

Before long, I had run out of office space to run through and was working my way back to the giant behemoth that had nearly cooked me. I slowed to a walk to consider my options. Nowhere on this floor had I seen a maintenance closet or even a bathroom to lock myself inside, so it looked like my only option was to climb up to the third floor, where Crosswire hopefully was. At least, I hadn’t seen any fresh grey corpses during my run.

I carefully retraced my steps, looking for the small offshoot that should lead to a stairwell. As my luck would have it, five of the protect-a-ponies were just rounding corner into the same part of the office as I walked in.

“Halt, zebra scum! Surrender and be vaporized!” they announced as one, and then the lasers started to fly. I dove behind an old desk, praying that it would withstand the barrage while I worked out a way to save my hide.

I brought up my inventory on my Pipbuck, scrolling madly through the list and searching for something to use. I still had a few grenades, but the robots were entirely on the other end of the room. I didn’t think I could throw a grenade that far. The problem was that nothing else in my inventory could help me.

The barrage against the desk intensified, and I could feel the wood against my back begin to heat up as it was repeatedly struck with the lasers. If I didn’t act soon, it wouldn’t matter what I had stored in my bags. In a moment of desperation, an idea came to me. I pulled a spark grenade from my saddlebags and took a small step away from the desk, peeking my head up to see exactly where the robots were.

Location figured out, I pulled the stem from the grenade, tossed it into the air, twisted around, and bucked. I struck the grenade solidly with my back left hoof, sending it flying across the room to land amidst the gathered protect-a-ponies, where it detonated a moment later. All five robots fell to the ground, disabled.

I walked out into the open, grinning like a foal on a day off of school. It took the sound of four more protect-a-ponies approaching to get me to remember that I was supposed to be running for my life. Under the high-pitched whine of their two-century old gears, I could hear the low rumbling of that behemoth of a robot following after me as well. That wasn’t something that I wanted to face again anytime soon.

I dashed down the short hallway away from the factory floor and up the stairwell, this time actually checking my E.F.S. before I ran out into the open. For all I knew, there was one of those giant robots on every floor, but all I could see where a mass of red bars in front of me, with one blue on mixed in. Being on the edge of the building sucked, but I least I knew Crosswire was still alive, probably.

The office space on this floor appeared as I peeked out of the hallway and searched for anything that might be trying to shoot me. My luck seemed to be turning: the room was empty. I stepped out a bit more confidently, swinging my head from side to side to check the corners of the room, but it remained clear. I grinned and trotted to the hall on my right, which should be towards the southeast.

Still nothing had attacked me by the time I reached the corner, and I started to get worried. It was too quiet. Well, since my entire job in this plan was to make as much noise as possible, I started trotting towards the northwest corner, making sure to kick every random piece of junk that was in my way, and generally make as much noise as possible. I would have been singing as well if it weren’t for the pistol in my mouth.

Finding the security center was easy, given that half a dozen protect-a-ponies were clustered outside of a door trying to break in. My guess, which was confirmed by my E.F.S., was that Crosswire was on the other side of that door, holding it shut with all of his might.

“Hey, boltheads, I’m over here!” I shouted around the pistol. When the first one turned to look at me, I fired. Unlike the armor from the massive robot downstairs, the protect-a-ponies’ couldn’t withstand the impact of a .45 round. My first shot hit the one that had turned to me square in the chest, but it barely seemed to have an effect as it brought its energy weapons to bear.

I fired again, sending three more bullets at the robot and taking it out of commission. That got the attention of the other five as they all turned to face me. “Now’s your chance, Crosswire!” I shouted, then turned and ran back the way I had come. I remembered seeing a small maintenance closet somewhere over there.

My memory served me well. I dove into the room and kicked the door closed. There wasn’t a whole lot of room in here, but there was enough for me to turn around and brace myself against the door and hold it closed against the protect-a-ponies chasing me. They arrived just as I got into position, slamming against the door and almost forcing me from my hooves. I struggled against them, pushing against the door with every last ounce of strength in my body. My injuries were finally beginning to catch up to me, and the burns in my hide that were pressed up against the door were in a lot of pain.

I stood there for what seemed like hours, legs locked tight and hooves pressed against any solid object I could find that would give me an advantage, wondering if it was ever going to end. Just as my strength was about to give out, I felt the pressure coming from the other side of the door let up. I cautiously opened my eyes and shifted so I was looking towards the door. If they had simply lost interest and gone back to attack Crosswire…

But my fears were unfounded. There were only two bars on my E.F.S., one red, and one blue. Wait? Why was there still a red bar? The override was supposed to knock them all out, or so Crosswire claimed. I stepped back from the door and carefully opened it. On the other side, the five protect-a-ponies stood, deactivated, staring at me with lifeless visors. Once again, I couldn’t help but laugh as I knocked one after the other over, amused that they were now so easy to topple.

When the adrenaline, as well as my glee at being alive, had finally run its course, I was shocked at how tired I was. My legs were shaking badly, and it was all I could do to stay on my hooves. I gingerly made my way back to the door into the security room and knocked. “Crosswire, it’s me. Open up,” I announced tiredly. All I wanted was to lie down and sleep, but there was still one last robot to deal with, not to mention the reason we had come here in the first place.

It took him a few moments, but the buck finally opened the door. He looked even worse then I felt. He had a nasty gash over one eye that was weeping blood, along with numerous burns in his hide. “Thought you were going to pull them all away,” he accused me, walking back into the room.

“Believe me, I tried. Guess the damn things didn’t get the memo that I was the target,” I joked, “Thanks for turning them off when you did. I would have been ash had it been a minute longer.”

“Well, we can’t have that. Thanks for getting them away from the door. I couldn’t do anything with them trying to come in after me,” he responded as he walked up to the terminal and started to type.

“What are you doing?” I asked curiously, peering over his shoulder to look at the monitor. As usual, all I saw were streams of useless symbols. I would never understand how the buck did it.

“All of this factory’s files are on this computer. I’m looking to see what they had in stock before the bombs fell, and where it all is. That should speed up the salvaging process,” he answered shortly.

I nodded understandingly. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I stepped away to give him some space and pulled a pack of centuries-old junk food from my bags. It was all I had left, and I needed the energy. I unwrapped it and popped the cake into my mouth. Whatever they used back then to keep food fresh must have been magical in and of itself, 'cause the snack cake barely tasted stale at all. When I finally finished eating, I turned back to Crosswire. “Find anything?”

He closed down the terminal and turned to face me. “Yeah. Main storage room is on the fourth floor, on the west side of the building. The cafeteria is on the same floor, except on the east. The infirmary is down on the second, to the north.”

I thought furiously for a moment, then swore loudly. “Luna be damned, this isn’t going to be easy, especially in our condition. There’s a fucking behemoth of a robot down there, and whatever you did didn’t shut it down.”

“What? Are you serious?” Crosswire asked, his head snapping around to stare at me, “The override I used should have shut down every single robot in the facility. Unless…”

“Unless what?” I demanded, “How could it stay operational if you deactivated them all?”

“Did it look like it originated from the factory?” Crosswire asked me, “Or was it really out of place?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, “I don’t know a whole lot about robots, so I couldn’t tell you what’s abnormal.”

Crosswire sighed heavily. “Did you see any others like it?”

“Oh. No, I didn’t.”

“Which means that it wasn’t supposed to be here, so somepony probably brought it here, and there’s a good chance that it happened after the bombs fell,” Crosswire mused, starting to pace.

“Why do you say that? Couldn’t the company have brought it here for security reasons? We are on the same continent as the Zebra nation after all,” I pointed out.

“I doubt that. The army would have been the main line of defense here. And it would have gotten in the way of production. No, it must have ended up here after the apocalypse,” he insisted, “And I think I know how we could get around it.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. This was an entirely new side of the buck. He was usually quiet and obedient. I had never heard him offer up an idea before. “And what’s that?”

All he did was grin and answer, “Trust me. It’ll work.”

* * *

This plan was absolutely insane! I don’t know how that mentally-unstable bastard excuse for a buck could possibly think that this could work. I was hidden behind one of the deactivated protect-a-ponies, cradling my last spark grenade in my hooves. Crosswire was supposedly coming up on the thing from the other direction, but I did not trust this whole idea.

I didn’t have to wait long for the signal. Crosswire whistled a simple three-note melody, so I began to move. This would either work, or we would both end up dead. I leapt out from behind my cover and launched my grenade. Its explosion seemed to do little more than get the robot’s attention.

The robot turned to face me and brought its flamethrower to bear. I dove off to the side, barely getting out of the way of the sheet of flame that consumed the protect-a-pony I had been behind a moment before. The robot tracked me, sending the flame across the entire room, and nearly incinerating me as I ran from desk to desk, barely keeping ahead of the inferno.

Just as I ran out of space to run, there was a sound of sparking, and the flamethrower died, allowing a sudden silence to fall over the building. I crept out from behind the desk I was using as cover and saw Crosswire standing over the robot, a mass of wires in his mouth. He spat them out and grinned over at me. “Piece of cake, just like I said.”

I shook my head at him. “Except for the fact that I almost ended up the main course at a barbecue.”

He laughed and started for the infirmary, but a low rumbling stopped us in our tracks and made us turn back to the robot. Its visor was lighting up and its limbs were starting to move. It shifted around on its tracks to face us and let out a loud screeching sound as an arm that ended in several weapon barrels came up to lock on us.

We dove out of the way as a stream of energy bolts shot past us to slam into the infirmary door. “I thought you disabled it!” I shouted at Crosswire. The noise drew the robot’s attention to me, forcing me to dive away from my flimsy cover as the gatling laser swept over it.

“I don’t know why it’s still functioning!” the grey buck shouted back, “That should have been its main processor!”

“Well, obviously not,” I growled as I pulled out one of my few precious plasma grenades. If that didn’t do the trick, then nothing would. I pulled out the stem, jumped out from behind my cover, and sent the grenade flying towards the robot. My aim was true, and the grenade landed right at the robot’s base, exploding an instant later in an inferno of superheated gas and plasma.

To my utter surprise, the behemoth was still functioning when the blast subsided, sending a stream of energy beams in my direction. The metal plating of the armor facing the blast was popping loudly as it cooled, though it had looked like some of the armor might have melted off. That might be our only chance at survival.

I pulled out my .45 and made sure it was fully loaded. Every instinct was telling me that this was stupid and suicidal, but I ignored it. I reared up from behind my cover and emptied the entire clip into the robots torso and head. Most of the rounds were deflected by the remains of its armor, but a couple of them managed to pierce the weakened metal and hit some vital components. The robot slowed visibly, but it was still dangerous. I dove back down into cover as it brought its gatling laser to bear, reloading my pistol as soon as I had a chance.

As I was about to jump back out, I heard the rapid staccato of Crosswire’s submachine gun. I leaned out of cover to see him emptying the clip of his weapon into the same area I had shot. The increased volume of fire slowed the behemoth even more, so I jumped back out and emptied another clip into it. Finally, after some loud groaning and sparking, the robot lay still.

Crosswire carefully approached the hulk, weapon floating before him, and checked the panel where he had pulled the wires. “Oh, that’s what I did wrong. The wires I grabbed were the ones for its speech synthesizer. These one are for the main processor!” he announced as he pulled out another tangle of cables, “Well, at least I know for sure now.” He deposited the wires, floated his gun back into his bag, and made for the infirmary, a wide grin on his face.

I shook my head again and followed after him. How he could so easily brush off the fact that the two of us had almost been completely vaporized by that thing, I couldn’t understand, and I doubted that I ever would. The thought became completely meaningless at the sight of several chests lying on a table against the far wall, each one adorned with the three pink butterflies that denoted the old Ministry of Peace, the pre-war organization that had managed all of the hospitals and care centers across Equestria.

I trotted right up to them and threw one open. Joy lifted me up into the sky at the sight of a half dozen deep purple healing potions. Without even waiting to check the other chests, I grabbed one in my mouth, ripped out the cork, and drank it. Instantly, I felt my burns begin to cool and the bullet wound in my side start to close. I grabbed a second and drank that one as well. I felt better than I had in weeks.

Crosswire was laughing heartily when I finally started to stow away the potions, rather than drink them. “What’s so funny?” I asked as I opened the second chest, which contained even more potions! We had hit the jackpot.

“Absolutely nothing,” he answered, instantly composing himself, but I could still see the amusement in his eyes, “Mind throwing me a couple of those?”

I sent a couple of potions threw the air towards the buck, then returned to rummaging through the chests. By the time I was done, my bags were positively brimming with healing potions and supplies, and we hadn’t even checked for guns or food yet. My true joy at the moment, though, came from the fact that, for the first time ever, Crosswire and I were cooperating less like raiders and more like regular ponies, to the point where I think I could use the term friend with him, instead of lackey or underling.

“Want to get the guns next?” he asked a few minutes later, which sparked something in my mind that I had forgotten.

“Shit, I need to find Hammer!” I shouted as I ran out of the infirmary.

The buck’s hooves echoed loudly on the floor as he followed me out. “Hammer?” he asked incredulously, “Who the hell is Hammer?”

“Not who, what!” I snapped back as I rummaged around the room where the big robot was, “It’s my revolver. I call it Hammer, ‘cause it kicks like one.”

“I suppose there are worse names for a gun,” Crosswire answered sarcastically as he joined me in my search.

It took us almost twenty minutes, but I finally found the revolver lying under a desk, a whole fifteen feet away from the door I had come through when I had run into the robot the first time. I immediately replaced my .45 with it, promising myself that I wouldn’t lose it again. I seriously loved that gun.

Once we were organized, we made the trip up to the fourth floor. It was eerie, walking by all of those disabled protect-a-ponies. I felt like they were watching me, and that at any second, they would reactivate and attack. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling.

The building was an absolute disaster, and this was the first chance I really had to see in how bad of shape it was. There was debris and grime covering just about every surface. Technical papers and memos littered the floors, most of the text completely obscured by the passage of time. Several desks had been knocked clear from their original positions by the force of the balefire bombs that had landed in the area. Overall, it simply felt dead, and I felt like a trespasser. As we climbed, my urge to leave became stronger, until I stopped dead at the top of the landing onto the fourth floor.

Crosswire made it five steps before he realized I wasn’t following. “You all right?” he asked, turning around, and he actually had a concerned look on his face.

“This doesn’t feel right,” I said, “I don’t think we should be here.” It was the best way I could put the feeling into words. Everything that had happened in the last couple of days was eating at me. Not forty-eight hours had passed since my life had been turned upside-down, and I was seriously questioning every moral I had held to for the last three years. Even my behavior was quickly changing. When rage had once come to me easily, I was already finding it difficult to get angry about anything. Honestly, I hoped that my odd feelings today were due to my dream last night. It was still heavy on my thoughts.

“And why not? It’s not like anypony else is going to come here,” Crosswire argued, “Besides, you said yourself: we need these supplies.”

I hesitated as I looked around the landing. This floor looked like a combination of a lounge and storage space, with chairs scattered about, but also with several signs pointing towards the weapons storage area. “I know, I just…” I trailed off, “It doesn’t feel like we should be up here.”

Crosswire shrugged and turned around, making his way towards the main storage area. His action forced me into a decision, and I wasn’t about to go back down myself. I followed after him, spinning my head around, looking for something that I couldn’t name. Finally, I felt my anger begin to rise. This paranoia made no sense. We had taken care of the danger, so there was no longer a reason to feel uncomfortable.

The anger felt good. Ever since we had been forced out of our camp in the mountains, I had been second-guessing myself, and forgetting that if I wanted to live, I would have to do what’s necessary. I’d been to a lot of places where I shouldn’t have been, and if anypony ever had a problem with it, then they got to meet my knife up close. It’s just the way the wasteland works.

We came up to the storage door, which was locked up tight. Crosswire examined it for a couple moments, then turned to me. “I can get this open, but it’ll take a bit. Why don’t you go check out the cafeteria, and maybe even the top floor. If I get it open before you get back, I’ll just start poking around inside.”

“Sounds good to me,” I answered and wandered off. I could use a little time alone, and doing something productive helped me focus. The fourth floor was surprisingly clear of protect-a-ponies, as if they had all been clustered on the lower floors. Then again, that could just be because of how long it had taken us to shut them down. There was a good chance that the ones that had been up here had managed to make their way downstairs.

I arrived at the cafeteria rather quickly and started rummaging through the various refrigerators, cabinets, and closets while I thought. That medical pony, Suture, had forced me to face a lot of things from my past that I hadn’t wanted to remember, but what really irked me was that she had awoken emotions in me that I had thought had been thrown in a hole, been buried, then had a house built on top of the hole.

Her arrival had made me feel guilt and sadness, two things that meant certain death to your average raider. Luckily, I wasn’t the average raider, so I was still alive. Neither of those emotions bothered me too much, either. The one that had gotten to me was shame. She had actually managed to make me feel ashamed of myself, and not because I wanted to impress her. Pretty as she was, my barn door didn’t swing that way. I had felt ashamed because she had actually cared about the lives of the ponies I had killed, regardless of the fact that they had been trying to kill her as well.

I remembered thinking that my departure from the raider camp could be my chance at turning my life around, but now I was wondering if I was really capable of that, or, more importantly, if I even wanted that. I was used to the raider lifestyle, comfortable with most parts of it, even. I knew my place there. Life as part of the rest of the wasteland was an unknown to me, and that terrified me. The last time I had been unsure of my place was when I had been living in Grovedale, and that had resulted in me getting kicked out of the town and losing everything I had gained up to that point.

Of course, the argument had to be made that that had just happened again. I paused in my looting and sat down at one of the cafeteria tables, sighing to myself. I wish that I would have had a chance to grab my journal before leaving. There was so much of my history and thoughts between the pages of that book, that there must have been something inside to help me figure out who I was again.

I took a few minutes to re-collect myself, then forced myself back to my hooves. Getting lost in things I couldn’t control wouldn’t help me to survive. That was the one idea I had to remain focused on. Everything else could come second. Nothing was more valuable than my life. Nothing.

I finished my looting of the cafeteria and made for the door. We now had enough food and water, some of it slightly irradiated, to last us a couple of weeks. That would be long enough that scavenging for more food wouldn’t be an immediate concern for a while.

Feeling distinctly better than I had the rest of the day, I trotted back to the stairwell to go search the top floor while Crosswire finished with the storage room door. Oddly, the feeling of being in the wrong place returned as I arrived. This time, instead of making me uncomfortable, it angered me. I had already gotten over this, why was it hitting me again? Fighting against the feeling, I walked up the stairs. Despite my knowledge that there was no longer anything hostile in the building, I found myself drawing Hammer. It was completely nonsensical, but it made me feel better.

By the time I reached the top of the stairwell, I was furious. The feeling had risen to the point where I was forcing myself to take each step, despite my anger. Whatever this was, it couldn’t be natural. I started to search the floor carefully, but there was nothing of interest anywhere other than old clipboards and a couple of caps stowed away in some cabinets.

I gave up on the floor and made my way back towards the stairwell. The search hadn’t really been worth it, since I hadn’t even found what it was that was making me feel uncomfortable. I was just about to start on my way back downstairs when I caught sight of a door from the corner of my vision. I had missed that room.

I turned to walk towards it, but found myself almost incapable of walking, but all that did was serve to piss me off even more. I growled deep in the back of my throat and forced my way forward, practically kicking the door down when I arrived. What I found almost defied belief.

Sitting in the center of the room on a table was a single crystal, glowing brightly. For a moment it reminded me of the Messaging Crystal that Crackshot had given me, but a second glance revealed that it was both much smaller, and seemed to have had something carved into its surface. I carefully approached it and tried to read what was written, but it looked like utter gibberish to me.

The feeling of discomfort was even stronger this close to the gem, which led me to believe that it was responsible for my near immobility. I lifted a hoof and knocked the gem to the floor. Even the small amount of distance that that created made me feel better. Not by much, but by a measurable amount. Finally, I had an outlet for my rage. I reared up on my hind legs and brought both hooves down on the crystal, instantly shattering it.

The effect was immediate as the feeling of discomfort vanished and I was able to move around freely again. Destroying the crystal had also caused most of my rage to evaporate, leaving me feeling tired and worn out, as one would expect after a long day of hiking, followed by a rather serious fight in this broken-down factory.

Now that the gem was gone, I turned my gaze to the rest of the room. It was mostly bare, but there were a few things that I hadn’t expected to find. Underneath the table where the gem had been was a small sack that was filled with various odd bits. First off, there was a small pouch of caps that I immediately pocketed. My Pipbuck told me that it had been full with five hundred caps! Not a bad find. There was also a small box of 9mm ammo, except this box was special in that the rounds were hollow point, so they would do a lot more damage to unarmored enemies. I pocketed those as well. It wasn’t anything I usually used, but they could come in handy somewhere down the line.

The final two objects were both more ordinary, but also much more enigmatic. The first was an unlabeled map of an area I had never seen before. To my eyes, it looked like some small settlement made of rubble and the ruins of pre-war buildings, so any of a half-dozen settlements in the wasteland. Peculiar to the map were a few arrows that pointed to the walls at a certain area, but without context, I would have no idea what it meant.

The other object was a holotape. I had seen plenty like it, and most were recordings from before the war, but this cache looked like it had been left only a short while ago, at least, not so far back that the cap wasn’t a currency yet. I slid the holotape into my Pipbuck and hit the play button.

“Hey, Greymane, I’m glad to see that you remembered this old location. I always knew you were a smart one. Either way, I left your payment in the sack, along with a map for your next assignment. I’ve marked how you’re going to get inside so nopony will notice you. Same deal as last time: Figure out what they want. Figure out what it’ll take to win their loyalty. Seahawk is planning on making his move soon, so we need all the information we can get. As usual, if the leaders don’t sound like they’d be agreeable, we left a box of hollow point for you. I hope you’re keeping Renegade as well maintained as you used to, ‘cause the rounds are 9mm. Your payment for this job will be placed where you met that mare, you know the one. She had that beautiful red mane and you kept us all up that night ‘getting to know each other’. You’re next assignment will be there as well. Time is of the essence now, Greymane. You’ve been most reliable so far. Keep up the good work.”

The holotape came down to a close and I stood there in stunned silence, and for more reasons than because it had summoned a memory of my mother to my mind, who had also had a red mane. That must have been a coincidence. The color was fairly common, after all.

The tape was recent, that much was plainly obvious, and there was a group of ponies planning on doing something in the area, and it didn’t sound entirely benevolent. Any change of that magnitude to the status quo wasn’t good, for anypony. We built our lives on the way things were, and change tended to be bad for survival.

I stowed the holotape and map in my saddlebags as well. Too bad the holotape hadn’t mentioned the name of the town. The speaker had obviously expected this ‘Greymane’ to know where it was. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to leave this stuff for him to find and use to help some crazy gang leader get a foothold over another town, no matter how corrupt or bad that town might be.

I checked the room one last time for anything of value, then returned to the stairwell and descended down to the storage area and Crosswire. By the time I arrived, he had gotten the door open and was inside, rummaging around.

“Anything good?” I asked as I entered, turning my head to peruse the walls. He didn’t even have to answer for me to know.

“Look for yourself,” he grumbled, knowing my question was rhetorical.

The walls were lined with weapons, ranging from small silenced .22s to big, and probably heavy, sniper rifles. Any weapon that Ironshod had ever produced during the war was here. I slipped a 9mm pistol off the wall and loaded it with the hollow point rounds I had picked up. You never knew when they could come in handy.

“Did you find any ammo that would fit Hammer?” I asked a few moments later as I looked from weapon to weapon. As pretty as the rifles were, they never felt natural when I used them which is why I stuck to pistols and explosives. Those, I was very comfortable with.

“Yeah, I think so. I placed them on the bench over there. You might want to check before grabbing them all. There’s no point in taking things we don’t need. I had planned on sealing this place up again before we leave. If we ever need ordnance like this, then at least we have our own secret stash,” the buck answered as he took down a submachine gun similar to his own and started stripping it down for parts.

I walked over to the rounds he had set aside and pulled out Hammer. Sure enough, the rounds fit perfectly, almost better than the ones I already had for it. I swept the rounds into my saddlebags, letting my Pipbuck’s inventory spell sort them out. This time, I actually paid attention to what kind of rounds they were. .45-70 magnum. Good, now I knew what to look for.

Crosswire and I spent the next ten minutes in silence as we pulled down various weapons and examined them. In the end, I only took a couple of extra pistols, including another revolver that was very similar to Hammer, but whose quality wasn’t quite as good. It would serve as a spare if I were ever to lose the former, and as spare parts should I need them. Crosswire took a couple of submachine guns and enough ammo to last him a whole day of constant firing. Those damn weapons practically burned through ammo.

As we were making out way out of the building, Crosswire finally thought to ask me about what I had found in the cafeteria and on the top floor. I quickly explained our new food and water situation, and told him about the lack of anything significant on the fifth floor, but hesitated at mentioning the cache.

“You’re leaving something out, Evergreen,” he said, without a hint of mocking in his voice. It was funny, because not three days ago, it would have been unthinkable for him to press me about this kind of stuff. Hell, even earlier today he had been starting to press for information.

“Yeah, I’m just trying to figure out the best way to explain it,” I answered slowly, “I found a cache in a small side room, which also was the source of that odd feeling I had earlier.”

Crosswire swung his around to face me and fixed me with a confused glare. “What are you talking about, Evergreen? You’ve been acting oddly for the last two days, and now you’re telling me that something was making you feel uncomfortable?”

“Look, I know it sounds strange. I barely get it myself, but I’m being serious. I had to force myself to walk into that room, and there was this little crystal or something sitting on a table. I smashed it, and the discomfort disappeared. Believe me, I wish I were making this up, especially considering what I found in the cache.”

“And what did you find? If there really was a talisman that was trying to drive you away, it must have been something good,” Crosswire said, though it sounded like he still didn’t quite believe me.

“Kind of,” I answered, “There was a pouch full of caps, as well as a box of 9mm hollow point rounds, and those were the most useful objects in there.”

“So somepony managed to find a talisman designed to keep ponies from going near it, just to hide some caps and ammo?” Crosswire asked incredulously, “Seems like a lot of effort for so little. Also, why were you the only one who felt it? Why didn’t I?”

I shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe you were just focused enough on what you were after that it didn’t affect you. I know I was more focused on just general salvage.”

“Still seems odd to have something like that for so little of value,” the buck grumbled.

“Well, there was more to it than that. There was also a map of a settlement and a holotape, both made fairly recently, if I’m any judge,” I explained.

“What do you mean? I’ve never run across a holotape that wasn’t some sort of pre-war nonsense,” Crosswire argued, “It has to be older.”

“Then why was it in a cache that had a ton of caps? It talked about somepony by the name of Greymane, and said that his next assignment was to infiltrate the town on the map and figure out what the leaders want, and to kill them if necessary. It also said something about somepony named Seahawk setting his sights on Seaddle. Now, I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound good to me,” I explained, “And it definitely doesn’t sound like something that would be in place before the bombs fell.”

Crosswire hesitated as he considered what I had said. He had always been the kind of pony to examine the facts before making a decision, and if the facts were there, he wouldn’t deny them. “You could be right,” he finally said, “And a change that large to the way things are wouldn’t be good, especially since this ‘Seahawk’s’ intentions and motivations are unknown. It definitely doesn’t speak well of him that he is giving somepony working for him the complete freedom to just murder ponies in charge of settlements. I mean, hell, I’m a raider, yeah, but even I would think twice about trying to pull something like that. You’re just asking to get yourself killed.”

I smiled, happy that Crosswire had come to the same conclusions as I had. “So I guess that makes our next stop Metro,” I said as we emerged into the wasteland. To my complete lack of surprise, it was still raining.

“Why Metro?” Crosswire asked, “Shouldn’t we make for that settlement on the map you found?”

“I would, if I knew what or where that settlement is. Metro is the biggest center of civilization in these parts. Somepony there is sure to be able to identify it for us, and I did find a ton of caps to buy information with,” I said, “Also, there’s a much smaller chance of the ponies out there recognizing either of us, and that can only work in our favor right now.”

Crosswire nodded thoughtfully. “Makes sense. And we can trade some of our salvage while we’re there; pick up some things that we still need, like more purified water, or more medical supplies.”

“That’s it then. We’re off to Metro!” I announced and started trotting off into the wasteland, heading in the general direction of the old pre-war metro station that housed the city of the same name. Things were already starting to look up.

Level up!
New Perk added: Loose Cannon – Thrown weapons (like grenades) can now be thrown 20% farther, and with 20% more accuracy

{This chapter took significantly longer to put together than the first one, as balancing Evergreen’s new and developing view of life with the way she has lived for so long turned out to be a lot more tricky than I had expected. Thanks, of course, to Kkat for creating FoE. Thanks of course also go to Cody and Green Leaf for editing. Without those two, this would not be in the shape it is!}