This world has got to be the most pathetic, sickly thing I could ever imagine.  Only once did I ever think it could do better.  Just once.  I don't know if I've been proven right yet.

Even so, it was only one goddess forsaken pony I really trusted.  What's worse?  It wasn't even me.

He was sad.  Insane.  Obsessive.  He was my best bucking friend in the two very different wastelands I traveled.  I...

I guess that's why I'm watching tears sink into the whiskey.

See, there are things these feeble ponies of now just don't deserve.  I still believe a real peace is one of the things we do need.  Not some lie, congregated under an idea of justice or necessity.  Hell, “the right thing” is a bad joke in itself; one colt believes in it, another abhors it, and another thinks it's the most amusing thing in the world before returning to his own devices.

One of the things that shouldn't be so distributed though, is knowledge.  The ponies of the wastes kill, maim, steal, and enslave for the sake of whatever.  Survival.  Convenience of the opportunity.  Pleasure.

There are things those ponies shouldn't know.  I met a mare with exquisite medical knowledge, for example.  What did she do with it?  Discovered just where to cut.

With education, she made what she called art.  Strung up her opponents, and when was done experimenting (if  she even did), left their skin-stripped muscle spread out along hooks and wire.  She'd take metal shards and implant them in skulls, or spread out flesh to form wings.  She said she was transforming “disgusting dirt ponies” into a more beautiful likeness- unicorns and pegasi- all for the sake of learning..  Thanks to her experience with makeshift anesthetic and pre-war med-x, those mantle pieces never did die until after they were awake enough to realize what she was doing to them.

You can't do that without knowing how.  You have to drive yourself to learn it, and then to practice it.  The why's to events like that always arrive much later, if they don't go completely ignored for the sake of feeling comfortable. In this day and age, we don't deserve to know the how's, with all our drives.  Especially if gutted “pegasi” hanging from the ceiling, screaming, are the most progressive things I've seen a pony do with knowledge.

It's the same reason I took to trying to protect Phen in what he was. It certainly wasn't for his sanity's sake.  He was the most callous pervert of intellect you could imagine.  It was also why his decision was probably the most ingenious thing to end the twisting of old knowings- he anticipated what ponies would do with what he found, being such an energetic avatar of it.  I never thought he'd be brave enough to do what he did, but he was.

We traveled together for a while.  I took pictures while we trotted and fought.  They were of everything, really.  The jagged beauty of the wastes.  The accepted evils of what smarter ponies were capable of, and the apathy toward it.  I have a few smiles of Phen, too.

I never thought they'd become a liability to track where he's buried. I just can't get rid of the pictures; not just in my own head.  No matter how drunk I allow myself to get, the piles of parchment sit here.  They persist, just like that bunker we made our way to, and just like how I begged whatever goddesses still exist that Phen died.

I came to hope he was rotting down there, with everything he had always craved to find.  I like to think he's just frosty bones, all alone amid the terminals, smack dab in the middle of a frozen circle of Tartarus.  It would be such a fitting end for the little bastard, grinning to death, muzzle-deep in a monitor within a city he always dreamed of witnessing in it's original glory.

I want to visit him.  I want to make sure.  I want to really bury him, if he is gone.  I keep leafing through this scrapbook, seeing all the smiles he had, and listening to the music on the radio.

But... I can't get rid of the other pictures either.  Too much sentiment, and such great reminders of why I'm playing this sorry ass part in our little duo.  Goddess.  This first photo...

These are the visions of my travels.  How they started, and why.  How they ended, and why.  Why I'm sitting here crying, spinning in whiskey thoughts, and yet again trying to make sense of what exactly I deserve for granting the world a fresh leash on deserved ignorance.  It's how I hoped my best friend would rot along with what he would find out, frozen and alone, beneath that snowy crystal rubble of a place my homeland called Sorrow.