/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

>>373098

Alright, so. I'm assuming most people at least know this fic by reputation, which is the only way I know it. As with every other fic I've reviewed, I'm going into this one more or less blind. The only thing I really know about it is that apparently it is Fallout: Equestria amped up to eleven: more blood, more cum, more edge, more insanity. And, last but probably far from least: more words.

Yes, that's right, you heard right. This story clocks in at an impressive 1,780,334 words. To put this in perspective, the original Fallout: Equestria by kkat, which is literally longer than War and Peace, clocks in at a mere 620,295 words. To put it in even more perspective, In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, which as far as I'm aware is still officially the longest novel ever written, is only 1,267,069 words long.

There are 77 chapters in total, with multiple chapters exceeding 30,000 words and most chapters averaging somewhere in the 20,000 range. This is by far the longest thing I've ever attempted to tackle, and I honestly can't promise I will actually finish it. However, I intend to give it the ol' college try. And, much like Captain Ahab pursuing his white whale in a famous story penned by literary limpdick Herman Melville, who only managed to squeeze out a pathetic 206,052 words; hardly a match for a virile stallion like Somber, I will do everything in my power to drag all of you sad sacks down into the watery abyss with me, as I pursue this mad and probably hopeless quest.

I will see you on the other side, gentlemen. May God have mercy on our souls.

Chapter 1: Inception

>Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
>By Somber
>Chapter 1: Inception
Well, this is off to a great start. Protip: no matter how your story is formatted and/or published, the odds are good that the title and author will be made apparent to whoever is reading it. You don't need to include this information in the text itself. Viewing this on fimfic, we can just scroll up a little and see what the book is called and who wrote it. To get the chapter title, we don't even have to do that much; it's literally written on the line directly above where the text begins. Perhaps Somber thought his chapter title was just so amazing that the reader would want to read it again immediately after having read it the first time. Snark aside, I understand that this text wasn't originally published on FimFiction, and the author probably just copypasted it directly from a google doc. However, would it have killed him to put a little effort into formatting?

Anyway, what the fuck. Here's the actual opening line for the story:

>“Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria…”
Well, at least he's not starting us off with a cliche.

And speaking of, here's the next line:

>War. War never changes.
Well, in Somber's defense, I'm pretty sure anyone writing a Fallout Equestria story is contractually obligated to include both of those lines somewhere in the text. At least he got them out of the way early on.

Incidentally, this well-worn Fallout trope is a bit misleading. War actually changes quite a bit; in fact I'd say it changes almost constantly. as an aside, I've actually been doing a bit of research on the Fallout series since I last delved into one of these. I even played a bit of the first game.

Anyway, what the fuck. Instead of nitpicking every single sentence, I should probably take a look at these statements in context. Here is the actual opening paragraph:

>War. War never changes. It had consumed our home, a war fought by foreign aggressors until great and terrible magics had been unleashed to burn all the world to ash and dust. Only our constant devotion to the Princesses had carried us through that terrible war, just as our unwavering faith in the Overmare maintained our continued survival within the earth. Trust in the Overmare; obey the Overmare.
As opening paragraphs go, this one probably works well enough. It reads like a cutscene intro from a Fallout game, and sets the tone for the rest of the story. However, the transition to the next paragraph is a bit jarring:

>The grating buzz of my alarm yanked me away from sleep. I stuck my left foreleg out from under the blankets, away from my head, felt around for the end table next to the bed, found it, and proceeded to whack my PipBuck against the tabletop until the right button was hit and the noise stopped.
Written this way, the intro paragraph reads like it's supposed to be part of the narration. So, in other words, the story so far goes like this: our protagonist mare is lying in bed, narrating the backstory of the world she lives in to herself for some reason, when suddenly her alarm goes off.

Anyway, what the fuck. Our protagonist, whose name is Blackjack, is awakened by her alarm clock one morning. We learn immediately that she lives in a place called Stable 99, and that life here is highly regimented.

>I had half an hour to wash, half an hour to eat, and an hour to report to my duty station. The same as it had been every day since I’d gotten my cutie mark.
Honestly, for a militarized dystopian hellhole, two hours to get ready in the morning is pretty generous.

Anyway, she rummages around, gets dressed, and heads down to the showers. On the way, she passes some murals that give us some insight into the setting:

>‘We are all the Overmare’s foals’ declared the caption of one picture of an abstract white unicorn hugging dozens of tiny ponies in her hooves. Another showed one lone weeping mare under the caption ‘Selfishness Separates’.
In all fairness, I will actually give this author some credit. So far, this story has a much stronger opening than the original FoE did. Kkat's story opened with a long infodump about PipBucks that had my eyes glazing over by the second paragraph. This one gets right to the point: here's our character, here's where she lives, here's what she's doing. Zero preamble, just action.

Welcome back.

>>373099

>I trotted into the sector’s communal bathroom, and immediately my ears perked to a familiar giggling. Walking past a stall, I glanced in at two mares employing unauthorized and probably ineffective washing techniques. According to the training manual, behavior like that in public spaces was punishable by whipping and restriction to C class rations, so it was pretty understandable that the pair looked up with some trepidation when they spotted me.
>“Oh, it’s just Blackjack,” the dappled mare, Pastels, said in relief before flushing and snapping at her partner, “I swear, you are trying to get us flogged!”
>“Fun,” giggled the white mare, Misty Hooves from the bakery, nuzzling her. Misty was a chronic offender. I didn’t know if she liked the kiss of the whip or if there was something else wrong with her. Or both.
Somber once again shows us that he ain't fuckin' around with infodumps or angsty monologues or anything like that. He just dives head-first into the gratuitous lesbian horse sex, and damn the consequences. This ain't your grandfather's Fallout Equestria; nosiree.

>“You won’t think so if it’s Daisy doing the flogging,” I commented, and instantly their smiles disappeared. I couldn’t blame them. With the constant duty and honor bullshit, a little flank spank was one of the few reliable means of recreation, and a lot of the security mares got really... enthusiastic about it. I stepped under the spray and immediately jerked. “Cold!”
So far, this is reading like a cross between a cheesy sci-fi dystopia from the 80s and softcore Cinemax porn from the 90s. It's way too early to be making statements about overall quality, but I will once again remark that so far this reads a lot more easily than kkat's story. Somber seems to have a much better grasp on the "show, don't tell" concept, and while the setting is the same cornball edgy dystopia, this one doesn't seem to take itself or its setting anywhere near as seriously as the first one did.

Anyway, at this point we do get a bit of an infodump. We are told that Stable 99 is the last bastion of life, and everything outside is a radioactive wasteland. To venture outside the stable is instant death. Inside, the stable's population is strictly maintained at 500 ponies, each of whom has an assigned job. Each pony is required to produce one child to take over their job when they die. Ponies in Stable 99 seem to live in constant fear of "another incident." It's not clear exactly what this means, but we are given a general idea: something breaks down, and a lot of ponies die horribly. There seems to be a general assumption that the world outside is uninhabitable, and if any of their life support systems go down in here, it's all ogre.

>“Fuck! Don’t think about it…” I said, trying again to shove it from my mind. That was made ridiculously easy by Midnight trotting past me towards the atrium. Instantly, my ruby eyes popped wide at her cute flank and graceful tail. Black on black and oh she needed to be mine!
Another dyke protagonist, eh? Oh, joy.

>“Hey! Midnight! Midnight! Hey! Hey! Wait up!” I shouted as I tripped and raced to catch up with her. Of course, she didn’t wait; she never did. Instead, she picked up her pace. “Damn it, Midnight! No running in the halls!” I shouted as I ran after her. What? I was security! I was allowed to break the rules when pursuing a fine flank!
So Midnight is this story's Velvet Remedy? Oh, joy.

Anyway, Blackjack goes trotting after some hot pone-tang, and is immediately apprehended by two other security mares, Daisy (mentioned earlier) and Marmalade. Daisy is described as being abnormally large, and earlier we were given the impression that she is physically intimidating.

>All security unicorns were supposed to know a selection of spells for policing the stable. Me… I had telekinesis… and telekinesis… and oh! Did I mention telekinesis? I couldn’t cuff or stun or do interrogation spells to save my life; all the practice I’d put in merely gave me a migraine.
Another unicorn who can only do the basic telekinesis spell? Oh, joy. I hope this author at least has the sense to put some reasonable limits on his tragically underpowered protagonist's tragically overpowered spell. Because if I have to watch another sanctimonious pipsqueak wander around the wasteland hucking boxcars at alicorns for another half million words, I might actually kill someone. Somepony. Whatever.

>The huge atrium was the heart and soul of pony life in 99. Almost half the stable could fit in the room for large events, more if everypony was really friendly. Huge support pillars had been sculpted in a parody of tree trunks, and the support beams had been fashioned to resemble branches. That was about the extent of trying to make 99 look like something outside.
As with the first Fallout Equestria, it's not clear how much this character ought to know about the world she lives in. The author actually hasn't nailed down the timeframe this story takes place in, but it's been explicitly mentioned that both Blackjack's mother and grandmother had held the same job she was, and there is an implication that her lineage goes back even further than this. In any case, she's clearly spent her entire life inside this stable. Does she know what a tree is? Does she know what the outside looks liked? Or looked like? Again, it would be helpful if we had some clue exactly how much knowledge of the old world was preserved in these Stables, and exactly how much of that knowledge would logically be passed down to the average Stable-dweller. This problem created huge logic issues in the original FoE; it will be interesting to see how this author handles it.

Anyway, what the fuck. Blackjack goes down to the Atrium. Apparently she still has hoofcuffs on, because Marmalade and Daisy put a pair of hoofcuffs on her and then jokingly refused to take them off. What a couple of merry pranksters; it's nice to see that ponies still like to have fun around here.

>>373142

>I passed the cafeteria where ponies loaded bowls with green recycled algae slime, scooped recycled fungus cubes onto trays, collected synthetic recycled carrot sticks and apple flakes into bowls, or heaped up stacks of green recycled grass chips, brown recycled hay chips, and white recycled cake chips upon their plates. All the food in 99 was recycled into more food. All the waste in 99 was recycled. We were recycled. And yes, even having lived here my entire life, I still found it easier to pretend that the machines just magically made the food poof into being. Still, despite being made out of recycled poo water, the chips were pretty tasty!
I'm told the Indians had a saying: when the chips are down, the buffalo is empty. In all seriousness, though, it's nice to see the author putting some thought into this stuff. I don't think kkat ever addressed how food in the Stables worked, and as I recall most of what the wasteland ponies ate was just prewar canned goods, which for some reason they still had in abundance more than 200 years after the megaspells.

Anyway, Blackjack still has the hoofcuffs on, so she goes to the table where Midnight is sitting. As luck would have it, Midnight is a PipBuck technician, which means she probably knows something about getting cuffs off. A couple of other ponies are there, by the name of Rivets and Textbook; not sure if they will be important characters or not.

It's clear enough that Blackjack whose name I just realized can be shortened to BJ has been after Midnight's no-no parts for awhile now, and it's equally clear that it's a one-sided crush. The author is probably using the original story as a jumping off point, so it's not surprising that there would be a couple of parallels. The obvious parallel here is that kkat's protagonist, Littlepip, had a one-sided crush on Velvet Remedy. However, LP spent most of the early story pining away silently after Velvet, whereas BJ seems to prefer a more direct approach.

>“Which means you’re intelligent. Skilled! That you possess far more competence than a lowly security pony like myself!” I said as she hesitated. I almost had her convinced! “I’ll pay you in oral sex!” I blurted. Textbook turned the shade of a spoiled apple, and Rivets covered half her face as she chuckled.
I was beginning to worry that there wouldn't be any cringey sex humor in this story, but it looks like I can put that fear to rest.

Anyway, BJ makes an ass of herself in front of her would-be lady friend, said lady friend wanders off in disgust, one of the ancillary characters makes a perfunctory "that went well" kind of joke, and the laugh track rolls.

>“I had no idea. I didn’t think you were into mares,” Rivets said with a smile, munching on her grass chips.
Really? I don't get the impression that subtlety is Blackjack's strong suit. Plus, she was very publicly chasing Midnight down the hallway just a few minutes ago, and from Midnight's response it's clear she does this sort of thing quite often.

Anyway, BJ and Rivets talk shop for a bit, and we learn a bit more about how things work around here. This stable is...strange. Jobs are hereditary: if one pony is a maintenance technician, that means her daughter will be a maintenance technician, no arguments allowed. Also, due to the strict population controls, if an adult pony dies, their child must immediately step in and take over their job.

I can understand the reasoning behind this arrangement in theory, but in practice this means that ponies are often thrust into jobs that they are not even remotely qualified to do. Specifically, it seems like the current Overmare is actually a young filly (I'm assuming something like picrel), because her mother was the Overmare, and presumably she died at some point. We also learn that a young filly is going to be taking over her mother's job in maintenance the following day due to that mare's untimely death. All in all, it seems like this stable's social structure is more than a little screwy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13oK9HMEtv8

Anyway, they banter a little more, and then Rivets takes her leave. The scene ends in a page break.

We rejoin Blackjack in the security team's briefing room, because apparently BJ's job is security. She still has the fucking cuffs on.

>Daisy and Marmalade snickered as I limped in, and I gave the rest of the security mares a sheepish grin and a shrug before taking my seat. Gin Rummy just sighed and looked at me with a slow, disappointed shake of her head. Still, wasn’t much she could do.
The hoofcuffs gag is funny, but it's getting a little illogical at this point. Are we seriously supposed to believe that in an entire room full of security ponies, not a single one, including this new character Gin Rummy, who is apparently head of security, knows how to take these stupid things off? Between the wacky job assignments and the Paul-Blart-tier security personnel they clearly employ, I'm impressed this stable has managed to survive for as long as it has.

Anyway, there's a fairly important-looking infodump that I should probably just drop in verbatim:

>Everypony in Stable 99 had a job assigned to them from birth. Maintenance ponies maintained, security ponies secured, and baker ponies baked. The forty or so males in Stable 99 were no different: they were breeding equipment. From birth, they had their segregated quarters in medical and were signed out by mares for reproductive purposes and, more frequently, recreational. There were twenty unicorns and twenty earth ponies on the breeding rotation. Once a male reached… how old was it? Twelve? Fifteen? -- they were put into breeding. Of course, to keep the number in rotation the same, that meant that a male had to be taken out of breeding and retired.
I'm assuming "retired" is a euphemism for "killed." I'm getting sort of a "Logan's Run" vibe from this place.

Anyway, the leadup to this is that a male seems to have escaped when it was his time to be retired.

I've been looking forward to you doing another review. I can't promise to provide much commentary, but you can be certain I'll be reading along and cheering you on as you take on the herculean effort of slogging thorough this work.

>>373145

Anyway, Gin Rummy concludes the security briefing with a thinly-veiled jab at Blackjack. When everyone is gone, BJ asks her to please undo the cuffs, and even though it is (apparently) part of BJ's job to know how to do this, GR obliges and takes them off for her.

>Technically, every security unicorn was supposed to be able to do that. Technically, every unicorn, much less every security unicorn, was supposed to be able to do a whole slew of spells that I couldn’t. Maybe Mom would get lucky and outlive me. One thing was sure: the second I became head security mare, Stable 99 was doomed.
I restate my objections to this Stable's screwy methods of job-assignment. It seems like not being able to do a spell that you need in order to perform the most basic functions of your job would constitute a pretty solid argument for your not being right for that particular job. As I recall, the Stables were part of some misguided social engineering experiment the CMC were involved in. I'm going to assume that "everyone picks a job out of the hat, and then those jobs become permanent and hereditary" was, for some reason, the experiment chosen for this particular Stable. Also: it turns out that Gin Rummy is actually Blackjack's mother.

Blackjack finishes her conversation with her boss/mother. She steps out into the hall, where the Overmare (Overfilly?) is throwing a tantrum about the maneframe (I still hate this word, but since it was inherited from kkat's universe I can't rightly blame Somber for it). It seems that Midnight was supposed to find some kind of old data file, only she wasn't able to open it due to super-boss-hacker-level encryption. Since it appears that BJ has the same tunnel-vision about mare pussy as her predecessor, her main (mane?) concern here is taking the opportunity to hit on Midnight. She is once again rebuffed, and the scene ends in a page break.

We rejoin her a short while later, in the bowels of the stable where all of the maintenance and utility operations are conducted. In spite of the Stable's rather strict disciplinary regimen, this area doubles as sort of an off-the-books Red Light District: gambling, liquor, acts of coitus not approved by management, that sort of thing. Presently, she is involved in a card game.

>I really had no idea how earth ponies managed cards. They just did. Me, I levitated them around as I looked at the other players.
I used to complain about stuff like this, until I started writing horse-fiction of my own and discovered that it really is a gigantic pain in the ass. You have to rethink nearly every action a character could perform based on them being in an equine body, and on top of that, you have three varieties of equine bodies to deal with. Since the canon setting is basically a world populated by horses that use tools and dwellings obviously designed for humans, it's virtually impossible to produce a satisfactory explanation for every single action. So, I feel like it's fair to let some of this stuff slide. Any action that you could plausibly imagine being drawn into the show (including "adult" actions like drug and weapon use that would likely get cut in editing) is probably fair game. Since we have canon depictions of earth ponies drinking from mugs and playing the cello, a group of them sitting around playing cards is probably not that farfetched, and "somehow" is probably a good enough explanation for how they are able to do it.

Anyway, in this scene, we begin to get the impression that even with an abundance of off-the-books amusements available to the Stable residents, there is still some tension between management and the rank-and-file. Blackjack, as a member of security, is permitted to participate in the card games but also ostracized socially. We are given the distinct impression that the other ponies do not see her as one of their own, and watch their speech around her.

>She’d offered me the cigar at the start of the game, a blatant class B violation that I’d never ever report her on. I had no idea how she manufactured them, but it was just another indication that things were painfully tense in the stable.
Going back to what I said about actions being plausible, this one is borderline. The act of a pony smoking a cigar is fine in and of itself according to the rules I laid out. However, the issue of how ponies living in post-apocalyptic bunker conditions would be able to grow and cultivate tobacco, let alone roll it into cigars, is a whole other thing entirely. For the sake of simplicity I'm going to assume that these are pre-war cigars, and that the Stable management has a supply of them cached away somewhere.

At this point, Rivets brings up the issue of Daisy and Marmalade bullying Blackjack. It seems like she's using this as a segue into a more serious conversation: she mentions that BJ's mother is a decent enough pony, but other security mares seem to abuse their positions. She also calls into question the fairness of the hereditary job system. It seems to be an uncomfortable topic for BJ.

At various points so far, BJ has fretted to herself about "Incidents." At first I assumed she was talking about mechanical failure of the Stable's various systems, but it seems she's more worried about riots or rebellions breaking out.

>Rivets chewed slowly on the end as her eyes measured me up. Finally, she gave a minimal shrug. “You tell me. Overmare has us running like crazy for a month updating her on the stable, seizes inventory, and Duct Tape dies doing work for her. Now she’s screaming at Midnight that she’s going to shoot her and has her own little guard of security ponies following her around tonight.”
The maintenance ponies appear to be under considerable stress, and it looks as though an "incident" might be brewing.

Also, as an aside, we are given a little tidbit about Blackjack at this point: her cutie mark is a Queen and an Ace of Spades, and she earned it in this very room inb4 zigger joke.

>>373100
>>373177
Thanks, glad to have you aboard.

>>373291

>“Some ponies don’t think she has a clue what her job is. Heck, some ponies don’t think she even knows herself. And some ponies have to wonder why Blackjack’s so insistent on coming to this game. Maybe to keep tabs on all of us?” Rivets asked as she nodded to the equipment around us. “After all, with all the interference, I doubt you can track us by our PipBucks.”
>The foreleg-mounted minicomputers were marvels of arcane technology; even if I didn’t understand the first thing about how they worked, I had to admit that they were useful. One of the functions most used by security was the ability to, if you had the correct address tag, track any other PipBuck. All I had to do was put in their name and I could find their location almost anywhere in the stable. Down here, though, it was another story. Probably why the missing male had gone to ground down here.
This is actually a pretty good example of how to feed essential information to the reader without deluging them with a massive infodump. The original FoE essentially opened with an entire tech manual about how the PipBucks work; this one mentions early on that the devices exist, but doesn't go into detail about any of its functions until said function becomes relevant. I believe I actually suggested using this method as opposed to kkat's in my review of the original story. Maybe Somber traveled forward in time and read my advice before he started writing.

Anyway, speaking of the future, the situation in the maintenance room is getting tense alright, that pun was terrible. It appears that, at best, the maintenance ponies are suspicious of Blackjack and suspect that the Overfilly sent her to spy on them. At worst, there is also a subtle implication that they are planning some kind of coup, and they are giving her sort of an "us or them" ultimatum here: either she can stay and join the rebellion, or she can gtfo. She opts for the latter.

Page break. She leaves the card game in a state of unease, hoping that she can talk to her mother later and relieve the tension without the need for anyone to get disciplined and/or killed. Since she's already down in the maintenance levels, she decides she might as well look around for that escaped stud and see if she can apprehend him. I'm sure her sexual frustration from earlier is in no way shape or form affecting her judgement here.

>Well, with the game a complete fiasco, Midnight continuing her cold shoulder, and me with six hours left in my shift, I might as well actually do some security work. Mostly the ten or so of us on C shift patrolled and wrote up any mare violating curfew. Down here, I might find more interesting violations, but it was rare that I’d ever run into anything major. I snapped on another function of the PipBuck: the Eyes Forward Sparkle.
>Instantly, a number of yellow bars filled my vision as the arcane device detected the number of ponies within a few hundred feet. It also had a few red bars, likely a few hungry radroaches looking to take a bite out of me. The E.F.S. was a function few ponies used regularly. After all, it only gave direction and hostility, and the indicator didn’t even tell you how far above or below you the bar was. For all I knew, that yellow bar was around the corner or a floor up. I entered in the P-21’s PipBuck address, but the little icon twitched around spasmodically. Likely he was down here… somewhere.
Incidentally, this is another good example of how to slowly reveal information through the narrative, rather than relying on infodumps. Here, the author also makes use of the good old-fashioned "show, don't tell" method.

>It wasn’t often that we had a stallion who tried to hide from retirement. Most just reported to security or medical to get their shot and that was that. Occasionally there’d be a crying or screaming fit in the atrium. Rarely, they’d suicide… ugh, please don’t let me find him hanging or poisoned down here.
I'd assumed that "retirement" meant that stallions are put to death once they are no longer useful as breeding stock, but this seems to imply that it's a form of chemical castration. The text hasn't clarified exactly what happens to these guys, but committing suicide in retaliation to being handed a death sentence seems like kind of a futile gesture. So, I'm currently assuming that the ominous euphemism of "retirement" just means spending the rest of your life not getting laid, which presumably some guys can't handle.

Anyway, she follows the blip on her radar-thingy, and tracks down what she thinks is the errant male. However, it turns out to just be a lost filly.

BJ asks the filly what she is doing down here and where her mother is, only to learn immediately that this is Scotch Tape, the daughter of the recently-recycled mare Duct Tape, whose job she is now performing. Open mouth, insert hoof.

>I couldn’t help but reach out and touch the steel walls of the stable. Somepony had daubed ‘Fuck the Overmare’ on the gray metal in flaking white paint. A shout of rebellion from the Incident almost a century ago, the last time the stable had torn itself apart. Back then, it’d been stallions challenging the Overmare and the rules imposed by Stable-Tec when the stable had been established. Today, it was Rivets against the Overmare.
Once again, the author displays some competence when it comes to revealing information. This place obviously has an interesting backstory, but he hasn't laid it out for us yet. Drop vague hints to make the reader curious (oh noes, "the incidents"), reinforce them through repetition so they stay in the reader's mind, and gradually hand out slices of information while simultaneously dropping new hints to ensure that curiosity remains piqued; that's how you do this. It's far too early to judge the book as a whole yet, but so far this guy is getting decent marks on storytelling.

Anyway, at this point Blackjack slips and falls face first into a puddle of shit that leaked out of one of the "recycling" pipes.

>>373293

She spends some time lamenting her state of affairs, but as she's getting cleaned up, she notices another blip on her Eyes Forward Sparkle. Once again, she assumes it's the missing dudebro, and once again she strikes out. The interloper turns out to be just a mare, who is in the (suspiciously unlocked) emergency supply room for...some reason. However, it turns out everything is in order; she's just in here "getting something" for Rivets.

The mare tells her that she is on Shift C (the current shift), but she's not tremendously convincing. Blackjack demands that she show ID, and she turns and bolts for the door. It is at this point that BJ begins to suspect that something is awry.

She chases her down and kneecaps her with her baton. Once caught, the mare reluctantly agrees to show ID, and at this point BJ makes an interesting discovery: the "mare" is actually the missing stallion in disguise.

>Like all stallions, his cutie mark was a white male symbol with dots underneath it; his had two rows of ten white dots. Below that would go one more dot… though I was never sure why, since after that he'd be heading straight to retirement.
This is kind of an interesting detail. I'm assuming the dots are for tracking age: presumably once a male reaches a certain age they are put into breeding, and then taken out when they reach another. However, earlier we were told that a male was retired as soon as a younger one came of age, so...I'm actually not sure what the dots represent. Maybe we'll find out.

Anyway, it looks like I'm not the only one who's a little confused about what "retirement" means. The stallion seems to also be under the impression that he was being put to death, thus his decision to run. Apparently his plan was to hide out down here and steal food from the supply closets.

BJ does her duty and informs him, in the best security-mare voice she can muster, that he his under arrest. He is clearly angry, and for a moment she is worried that this will turn into an altercation, but he ultimately accedes to her request. However, he does make a rather cryptic remark:

>“Like you retired him,” he replied softly, his storm blue eyes darkening as he stared at me.
It's not entirely clear who "he" is, but presumably we're meant to wonder for now.

The stallion then accuses BJ, and by extension the rest of the security team and presumably the Stable management as a whole, of being murderers. BJ takes mild offense to this, but otherwise doesn't react. She escorts him out of the storage room and back towards the stairs, when suddenly another security mare appears and busts his leg with a baton.

It turns out the newcomers (there's actually two of them) are Daisy and Marmalade, the two security mares from before, who put the hoofcuffs on Blackjack. We learn that they have been down here for the last several hours, apparently tasked with finding the missing stallion. Though it's been hinted that these two have a history of bullying Blackjack and are not the nicest ponies in the world, at this point we learn that their sadism goes beyond just pulling mean-spirited pranks.

They pretty much jump right into "crooked cops from a 90s hood film" mode: they claim the suspect is resisting arrest, and proceed to savagely beat the shit out of him, with the clear intent of killing him. Once again, the issue of what, exactly, "retirement" means becomes muddy: their justification is that they are just doing what Medical was going to do anyway.

Blackjack now has a moral choice presented to her, within the context of her job as a security mare. On the one hoof, she can stand idly by and let these two lunatics beat this poor faggot to death, or alternatively she can step in and defend him. It's a common setup, where the protagonist has to make a choice between doing what's expected of her vs. doing what she thinks is right. However, in this case there's an extra dimension, as it's entirely not clear what is expected of her in terms of her job function. You could take the side of Marmalade and Daisy, and argue that since this guy is going to die anyway they're not doing anything wrong, and since BJ is security she should side with her fellow security mares and look the other way. You could also argue that these two are way out of line, and that she has both a professional and a moral responsibility to step in and use corrective force against her teammates.

This choice actually seems to allude to something that was brought up earlier:

> If I was lucky, I could get through this shift without any more disasters and, if I was really lucky, talk to Mom and not the head security mare about the rising tension.
She specifically draws a contrast between "Mom" and the "head security mare," indicating that they are two different roles for the same character. The function of both roles is similar: they are both essentially supervisory and intended to provide instruction and guidance. However, one relationship is personal and the other professional.

From this, we can probably guess at how BJ is thinking about this choice. The head security mare might advise her to maintain solidarity with her teammates, and to carry out her duty, which in this case means apprehending this escaped male, presumably so he can be killed. If he just happens to die on the way to being killed anyway, it's probably not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. However, "Mom" might have a different take: it's wrong to savagely beat a guy to death, even if he is going to be killed anyway, and you should do what's morally right, even if it means going against your teammates.

There's also another way you could frame this decision. During the card game, Rivets essentially gave BJ another choice: either you're one of us or one of them, as in rank-and-file vs. management/leadership. The choice here is similar: either she sides with management and looks the other way while this guy gets beaten, or she defies management and steps in.

>>373300

Anyway, tl;dr she decides to step in. She attacks her two fellow security mares, much to their surprise:

>Daisy’s shock transformed into rage much faster. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? He’s a fucking worthless male! He’s disposable!”
Daisy is apparently this stable's answer to Carl the Cuck.

>And one more thing I could do with telekinesis: with another thought, I triggered my PipBuck’s ‘Stable-Tec Assisted Targeting System’. The S.A.T.S. was a magical spell that momentarily slowed time almost to a stop and let me line up my attacks perfectly. Each attack cost some spell charge that had to build back up over time, but right now I wasn’t going to waste any of it. Three baton strikes to the head. The spell even gave me the probability of each strike landing!
Oh, goody. It's our old friend S.A.T.S. Can't wait until Blackjack starts using it to effortlessly auto-headshot entire gangs of raiders.

Anyway, tl;dr Blackjack successfully prevents the severe beating of a high school Spanish teacher. Daisy and Marmalade both survive, though they seem hurt and confused by BJ's sudden attack. In any case, the conflict is suddenly brought to a halt when a message comes through on their PipBucks: all security personnel are to report back to the security briefing hall.

Daisy and Marmalade exit the scene, letting BJ know that they will inform Gin Rummy that she has apprehended the errant male and is bringing him in. Presumably they won't say anything to her about BJ's attack on them, but it sounds like this fight isn't over yet.

Meanwhile, the FUCKING WHITE MALE is in pretty bad shape. Scotch Tape, the filly from earlier, witnessed the altercation. BJ sends her off to find a first aid kit. The male is introduced as P-21 (we actually knew this already, though here we get confirmation that he has no other name). We also get a bit of an explanation as to how the naming convention works:

>“Oh…” Males in 99 lived in medical and were identified on their breeding roster by their designations. P for earth ponies, U for unicorns. Don’t ask me why the former wasn’t E; I’d never gotten a straight answer. Maybe the Overmare who set up the system was a lot like the current one. 1 would be the newest stallion on the breeding roster, 20 the oldest. Being 21 would mean that a male was to be retired.
I'm not sure why 'P' would designate an earth pony either; pegasus would be what you'd logically expect. Though if I remember correctly, in this setting the pegasi are all part of the Enclave ugh, I'm already getting war flashbacks to reading kkat's pile of shit.

Anyway, the filly returns with a first aid kit. Seeing as how BP and presumably the filly have no medical training, I'm a little curious how they will manage to fix a broken leg and God only knows how many internal injuries this guy currently has...oh, wait. We're in the FoE universe. That means that medicine is absolute bullshit:

>There were two healing potions, small bottles of rich purple fluid capped in plastic. All a pony had to do was to bite hard on the end, crack the seal, and suck down the magical healing contents.
Again, I can't really fault Somber for this since he inherited the rules of kkat's universe.

But, and thank God for small miracles, it looks like he at least makes a few concessions to plausibility:

>As he gulped down the contents of the bottle, the bruises immediately began to disappear. His leg, however… “I’m going to have to set this,” I said as I looked at the limb.
>“You know how to do that?” the olive filly asked. P-21 just groaned as he clenched his eyes shut.
>“Nope,” I replied and took out the syringe of Med-X painkiller.
She attempts to set the leg, it's unclear whether or not she's actually successful. In yet another concession to plausibility, she attempts to use the second healing potion, but it doesn't seem to have much effect. There seems to be at least some reasonable limitation on what healing potions can do.

Anyway, tl;dr she gets his leg set and into a brace that she found in the first aid kit. There is also a drug called Buck in there, which she gives him. I remember that one from the first FoE, though I don't remember what it does exactly. Apparently it's contraband around here, though.

Page break. BJ brings the injured stallion up to the security level. There are ten security mares total on BJ's shift. The remaining seven plus the two that BJ beat up are gathered in the security room, as per the alert that went out earlier. They all stop talking as soon as BJ enters the room, so presumably Daisy and Marmalade have told them all what happened.

She puts P-21 into a nearby jail cell and confiscates his PipBuck. Then, the Overfilly enters the room:

>Some ponies liked to say she looked like my little sister, though never in earshot of Mom, of course. The Overmare’s white hide was a little more dingy than mine, and her eyes were a lighter pinkish color. Her mom had once styled her mane in elaborate curls and dressed her up in fancy outfits, but, since her death a year ago, the Overmare had chopped her dove gray mane short and worn nothing save her PipBuck, almost flaunting her Stable-Tec logo cutie mark.
I'm not sure if we're supposed to assume that BJ and the Overfilly are related somehow. They have different mothers, obviously, but they might be cousins or something.

Things then take an unexpected twist:

>When she saw P-21 and me, her smile only widened. “Oh… you found my trick pony!” she said, clapping her hooves together in glee. Her trick pony? P-21 stared straight ahead, his eyes unfocused pinpricks as she walked up to the bars. “Oh we’re going to have so much fun. Oh yes we are. Yes we are. You’re going to be mine forever. Yes you are.”
Looks like the "retired" stallion has a new job: sexually servicing post-apocalyptic Cozy Glow. Oh well, beats being euthanized I guess. All things considered it's probably good BJ stopped him from being beaten to death.

>>373358

Anyway, the Overfilly has a little more to say, but she's pretty much what you'd expect: a spoiled, impulsive child who clearly has too much power and too little supervision.

Slightly more interesting is P-21. As the Overfilly is going on about stuff and whatever, he signals to BJ that she should copy the data stored in his PipBuck. She tries, but unfortunately the Overfilly takes it away from her before it finishes the transfer. In yet another surprise twist, she then orders BJ locked in the jail cell alongside P-21.

The reason for this is unclear. The most logical explanation is that it's punishment for what she did to Daisy and Marmalade earlier; however, I'm not 100% certain the Overfilly knows about that incident yet. Moreover, there's the reason the Overfilly ordered the security personnel to assemble: she is planning some kind of violent crackdown on the Maintenance rebellion, and she needs all hands hooves, whatever on deck. In this situation, it would stand to reason that any disciplinary proceedings would be put on hold until the immediate crisis has been dealt with. It appears that the reason for locking BJ up has to do with her friendship with Rivets and the other Maintenance ponies.

Anyway, BJ gets locked up, and the Overfilly takes the remainder of the security force and goes to deal with the Maintenance uprising. Daisy, meanwhile, gives BJ a rather nasty look on the way out. The Overfilly is clearly paranoid about loyalty, and is suspicious of BJ already. Since Daisy is clearly higher in her favor, and now has a bone to pick, it's likely that BJ's situation has become considerably more precarious.

Page break. P-21 does not seem to be in the mood to talk, and BJ has nothing else to do, so she decides to go through some of the files she copied from his PipBuck. Since the transfer didn't complete, there are a lot of corrupt and incomplete files, but it looks like she did manage to save a few of them.

She discovers an audio recording of a scene from the Overfilly's office. P-21 is in the process of fixing the Overfilly's sink and by fixing her sink I mean having sex with her, and by having sex with her I mean fixing her sink. Then, Duct Tape (the mare who died; mother of Scotch Tape) enters the room. The Overfilly has some kind of special project for her, as she is the only Maintenance pony she trusts. There is a heavy implication that the project involves sabotaging something on the Maintenance levels. The Overfilly assures Scotch Tape that if she does a good job, she will send P-21 over to fix her sink.

The file cuts out, but we get the general idea. The Overfilly is planning to do something horrible to the Maintenance ponies because she suspects them of treason (or whatever it's called down here). To some extent this suspicion is justified, since we saw earlier that the Maintenance ponies appear to be planning some kind of coup. Any conflict is likely to jeopardize the overall survival of the Stable, since the Maintenance ponies are the ones who understand how everything works.

BJ tries to press P-21 for information, but P-21 isn't having it. The Stable is run by a wacky matriarchy that used him for sex his whole life and now plans to discard him (although it's looking more and more like the Overfilly plans to keep him around as some kind of private cabana-boy off the books). So, he is understandably indifferent to the Stable's fate. However, he has a proposition for BJ:

>He clenched his eyes shut. “If I help you… you have to help me.” He looked at me again with a ferocious glare. “You have to let me leave this place,” he said in slow, even tones of carefully measured control. “Even if I die outside in ten seconds, at least it will be ten seconds free.” What, he wanted to die outside rather than be retired? Ooookay…
I can't tell if the author is being intentionally vague to build mystery, or if this is just another communication problem due to bad writing.

I'm still not 100% clear on what "retirement" means for the males. At first I assumed it meant death, then it was starting to look like some form of chemical castration, now it's sounding like it actually does mean death. In addition to this confusion, there's the confusion of what the Overfilly has planned for this guy. The paragraph I quoted above, combined with the audio recording we just heard, strongly implies that the Overfilly plans to keep him alive as some kind of personal sex slave. However, BJ's narration keeps talking about him like he's still going to be retired. Which could still mean either castration or death. The author could be a little bit clearer about what all of this is supposed to mean.

Anyway, they reach an agreement: BJ will help him escape, and in return he will help save the stable. As soon as he has her guarantee, he pulls a screwdriver and bobby pin out of his ass (literally) and gets to work on the lock. Meanwhile, he tells BJ to listen to the last recording he made with Duct Tape.

As you might expect, this recording is also >lewd. However, we get a little more of an insight into Duct Tape's character. While the Overfilly's interest in P-21 is obviously mostly physical, Duct Tape seems to actually be in love with him. The Overfilly appears to have bribed her by promising her the chance to "marry" him when her task is complete.

This, however, seems to be the salient point of the conversation:

>Duct Tape cussed softly under her breath and then sighed. “Well… I guess you won’t tell anypony.” She gave a little giggle, but P-21 remained silent as Duct Tape went on. “The Overmare has gotten in contact with Stable-Tec! The outside is safe and clean and we’re all going to be able to leave the stable soon!” She gave another joyous giggle. “In fact, she’s getting a broadcast from Stable-Tec right now!”

As the conversation progresses, we learn that DT's task actually involved unsealing the door so it can be opened. The plot seems to be thickening.

Great to have you back, Glim. I look forward to sharing more autistic Fallout knowledge when necessary and seeing your insights.

>>373364

Hey-ho, sorry about the extended absence. Back to it, then.

So anyway, it looks like the Overfilly has some sort of plan to unseal the door and exit the Stable. The plan is being kept secret currently because she doesn't want to cause a panic. This actually more or less makes sense, since I get the impression the Stable's life-support systems are starting to wear out, and the tensions between labor and management are making daily life rather difficult. Presumably the Stables would have been built with instruments and whatnot that could detect when the outside environment is safe. I'm assuming there's probably more going on here than we're being told.

>Stable-Tec says they need a special data file from the stable that will tell them how we’ve been doing the last two centuries. EC-1101. So she’s had me extracting it from the system. It’s a doozy of a file, and buried pretty deep.
Presumably, the idea here is that the Stable would have some kind of general log file recording everything that's happened during the time the ponies were staying there. Stable Tec would logically want this file so they could review their data; however, this assumes that Stable Tec would even still exist as a company once the experiment was over. Considering what the Stables were designed for, this seems like a pretty big if. I guess it's better to have it and not need it, but it also seems like something that would be rather low priority.

Anyway, at this point the other shoe drops. P-21 ominously advises Duct Tape not to trust the Overfilly, and to protect her goddamn neck. The recording ends here.

Blackjack does a bit of musing, and concludes that not trusting the Overfilly is probably sound advice. She finds it suspicious that her mother, who is head of security, was not told about this plan to open the Stable. While it's not clear what exactly the Overfilly has planned, it is clear from what we've read so far that she wasn't exactly the best horse for the job to start with, and at this point she has pretty much gone bananas.

>I glanced at my PipBuck. There were dozens of radio channels on it, but only six were used by the stable. I clicked to security, but it was dead during C shift.
This seems odd, considering that an entire troop of security mares just left to go put down a revolt.

Anyway, BJ now receives a mysterious transmission on her PipBuck, which appears to be coming from outside the Stable. She records it.

>That was it. I needed to get out of here. I needed to talk to Mom…
>Except… would it be enough? Mom… I wanted to think that she’d believe me. That I’d be more than ‘Blackjack the screwup’. That she’d take it seriously because it came from her ‘little blank flank’. Or that she’d stay in ‘security head’ mode but accept the evidence I had… and would do something about the Overmare.
It's becoming a bit difficult to keep track of everything going on. What exactly is BJ trying to do here? My understanding is that she and P-21 are trying to escape and leave the stable, but here she sounds like she wants to find her mom and present some evidence against the Overfilly. This evidence would be...what? That she's bonkers? Seems logical that Gin Rummy would be well aware of this already. Moreover, it seems like she wouldn't care; she seems like a "duty first" kind of mare, and would be unlikely to turn on her commanding officer unless she had a damn good reason.

On top of that, it's still unclear what fate P-21 is trying to avoid. Is he afraid that he's going to be killed? Castrated? Forced to bang a crazy filly until she gets bored with him and has him castrated or killed?

And on top of that, there's still the question of what, if anything, is going on with that whole maintenance rebellion thing? Lots of loose ends and ambiguities here, and there's a lot going on. Let's hope the author isn't trying to juggle more balls than he can manage so to speak.

Anyway, P-21 gets the lock open and they leave the cell. Nice of the Overfilly not to post a guard on them or anything.

>“Don’t count on it. If I need a lock opened, I get a key,” I countered as I pushed open the grate and trotted into the deserted security section. Oh, key; reasoning that I might as well not make things worse, I scooped up the PipBuck key and pen-thing and put them back in the drawer. Right, back to the Overmare going crazy. I could try and get Mom on the radio, but I knew Daisy and the others would be listening to that channel. Everypony else would be asleep or under curfew. “Look. I need to get down to tell Gin Rummy about this.” Then I looked down the stairs… I also needed a gun.
See, this is kind of what I was talking about. This paragraph is all over the place, and it's not really clear what BJ's priorities are right now. As far as I can tell, the plan is to find Gin Rummy, warn her about...whatever, the crazy Overfilly I guess, and then...escape? Did I get that right?

>Goddesses, was I really thinking of shooting security ponies? Even Daisy… the thought of such a thing made my stomach churn. No crime was worse than murder in the stable. Killing another mare was robbing the stable of somepony needed to keep everypony alive!
She now appears to be contemplating murder, and I'm not entirely sure why. Presumably she is either worrying about being attacked while escaping, or perhaps she plans to intervene in the management-vs-maintenance debacle that I assume is still on the docket.

>But if the Overmare was up to something…
It's pretty clear that she is indeed up to something, but as to what that something could be...still quite a bit murkier than it ought to be.

Anyway, BJ leaves to go find her mom and warn her about............... the thing for which she requires warning, I guess. Meanwhile, P-21 stays behind for some reason, and proceeds to fuck around with the terminal for some other reason. BJ makes it to the Atrium without incident.

>>373390
Welcome aboard, nice to have you back.

>>373576
> Then Marmalade glanced back across the atrium at me. She blinked, then gave a simple little smile and a little wave of her hoof. Smiling slackly, I returned it and nipped into the cafeteria before anypony else noticed. My heart hammered in my chest, and I didn’t dare glance back towards the tiny chamber off the atrium.
Wait, isn't Marmalade one of the ponies she was fighting earlier? As a matter of fact, she is.

This is exactly what happened:
>I looked at the pair beating him in glee and charged Marmalade first. Last thing I needed was another pair of hoofcuffs on me! Her orange eyes widened in shock as the baton cracked loudly against her skull with such force that she tumbled over. Goddesses, I hoped I hadn’t killed her.

So...let me get this straight. Marmalade, along with her friend Daisy, who is Blackjack's bully or adversary or frenemy or something, attempts to beat this P-21 faggot to death. In violation of protocol, BJ steps in and attacks the two of them with a nightstick, apparently injuring her co-worker Marmalade in the process. This action does not go over well with either the Overfilly or the other security mares, and eventually earns BJ a stint in the laundry brig. Once again violating protocol, she escapes said brig, eventually making her way back down to the Atrium, where she is spotted by none other than Marmalade, the pony she was just put in jail for beating up. It is worth mentioning that the other security mares are presently dealing with a potential Maintenance rebellion, and in addition to having brained two of her co-workers, BJ is also suspected of being sympathetic to the wrong side. Even if she sympathizes with BJ for...whatever reason...Marmalade could be reprimanded herself for not reporting the escape of an arguably dangerous prisoner. However, in spite of all of this, she decides not to sound the alarm because...reasons? I guess? I'm sorry, but her behavior here does not make sense.

Anyway, fuck. For reasons that are left completely unexplained, the presumably-still-concussed-from-earlier Marmalade decides to just wave at escaped prisoner BJ like a ninny, instead of doing her job. BJ, meanwhile, makes her way unimpeded to the sleeping quarters, where for some reason Gin Rummy, who is head of security, is sleeping instead of participating in the Security team's operation against the Maintenance team.

Actually, scratch that, turns out she isn't sleeping:

>Then I saw that her bed was still neatly made, and for a moment I felt my heart stop. She wasn’t here? Why wouldn’t she be here? She was always here!
Considering the circumstances, it would actually be much stranger if she were here. I get that it's not technically her shift, but as the head of security it would stand to reason that Rummy would be woken up in the event of an emergency. Unless I am radically misinterpreting what's going on, the current situation seems like a pretty clear-cut emergency.

Anyway, this just keeps getting more confusing. Instead of being with the rest of the security team, where she logically ought to be, or in bed sleeping, where Blackjack apparently expected her to be, Gin Rummy is actually somewhere else entirely, for reasons I can't even begin to fathom. Maybe she's taking a shit; who knows? In any case, BJ punches her mother's tag into her PipBuck, and discovers that, apparently, she isn't even in the Stable anymore. Either that or she put her PipBuck in airplane mode, probably because she was sick and tired of her autistic nitwit of a daughter always bothering her in the middle of the night.

>I screamed a little in frustration, beating my hooves in front of me!
Oh, come on. How often to do you get to do something like this? Why not cut loose and live a little? Go ahead, scream a lot in frustration! You've earned it, slugger.

>The Overmare was doing something. I needed to know what. I needed to know what all those signals the Overmare received meant.
Clearly this mare has some mad detective skills. After half a million gawd-a'mighty words of Littlepip's insufferable nonsense, it's nice to see an author willing to take things in a completely new direction with a completely new character.

>Well… I’d been looking for an excuse to bug Midnight in her quarters for months. Looked like I finally had it!
Wait, nope, scratch that; it's just another annoying unicorn sperg who lets her clit do literally all of her thinking. Oh well, at least she has a cool racing stripe in her mane.

Anyway, BJ leaves her mother a note explaining that the Overmare is "up to something," and then runs off to Midnight's to hopefully get her box munched. I can only assume that she has by now forgotten all about both the "incident" she was going to try and stop or whatever, as well as the stallion she promised to help escape.

Unfortunately for her, though, it seems that her efforts are in vain; her box is destined to go unmunched for the time being. She uses her security clearance to unlock Midnight's door without permission, and walks in on her doing the nasty with another of the Stable's designated gigolos.

Midnight is predictably upset at being barged in on, but BJ explains that she actually has something really important to discuss:

>“The Overmare is getting a signal from outside the stable,” I explained as I found the recording on my PipBuck. “I need to know what it’s saying.” Playing the odd string of beeps and boops seemed to finally convince her I was serious.
So this is the big emergency now? Not the pending blood-brawl between Security and Maintenance, not the stallion who's about to get executed and/or laid, not the Overmare doing whatever the fuck she's supposed to be doing that's bad? The issue now is this morse-code message she intercepted on some oddball frequency that might be dangerous, or could just as easily be literally anything else, including an old pre-war transmission instructing her to be sure to drink her Ovaltine? Just checking.

>>373580

Anyway, since Midnight is a PipBuck technician (I think), it more or less makes sense that Blackjack would seek out her counsel vis a vis the whole beeping PipBuck message thing, which for some reason or other is her biggest concern right now. Midnight works her 1337 h4><0RR magic, and plugs into BJ's PipBuck.

>U-10 hummed to himself as he stood patiently off to the side by the door, looking over Midnight’s knickknacks. Midnight’s roommate was nowhere to be seen; no surprise. I knew I wouldn’t want to be around another mare on the queue… Probably.
This is a minor concern at the moment, but what exactly is Blackjack's deal? Is she a lesbian or...what? She has a thing for Midnight, obviously, but she's also mentioned getting dicked a few times already and we're only on Chapter 1!. This story is already proving quite a bit raunchier than kkat's, and I get the impression Somber's goal is to intentionally one-up kkat in the edge department. So, my current working theory is that BJ will turn out to be bisexual or something. I'm relatively certain this story's publication predates the whole "mayonnaise is a gender" revolution, so presumably a bisexual character would still have been considered pretty edgy.

ANYWAY, Midnight does her thing, and eventually they get the message decrypted. It reads as follows:
>be sure to drink your Ovaltine
>Stable-Tec security forces incoming tonight, 0100 hours. Have EC-1101 prepared for extraction. You’re doing the right thing, Overmare. You’ll be getting control of your stable back. Deus.

So...Stable-Tec, the pre-war company that built the Stables, is...still around? Am I understanding this correctly? Technically speaking we don't know anything about Stable-Tec or the broader FoE setting, since the author hasn't told us about it yet, but since I now have a working knowledge of the setting based on the previous fic...I'm a little confused. I guess I'll just have to keep reading and find out what happens.

Oh, also, while Midnight was working on the message BJ was keeping an eye on Daisy's movements, because she can do that apparently, and it seems that Daisy has returned to the security room. Not sure if that will be important or not, but the text explicitly mentioned it, so I figured I would too.

Anywho, BJ asks about this EC-1101 file, which I guess is the log file that the stable uses for whatever-the-fuck purpose, and Stable-Tec now wants it for some other whatever-the-fuck purpose. For some additional whatever-the-fuck purpose, Blackjack now wants to know the location of this file, which we learn is on some whatever-the-fuck maneframe located wherever-the-fuck. At this point I have completely lost track of what this horse is supposed to be doing; it may or may not still have something to do with putting down a revolt and/or helping what's-his-nuts escape sex and/or captivity.

In any event, it doesn't matter, because suddenly the door opens and in walks a total stranger:

>There were five hundred ponies in Stable 99. I might not know them all by name or even quite all of them by sight, but looking at the mare in the doorway, there was no possible way that she could have been from our stable. Her mottled hide was a stained and blemished yellow decorated with scars and bite marks. The whites of her eyes were stained a solid piss yellow. Her mane had been pulled into bloody spikes. She wore barding made of strips of leather and tires and decorated with countless nails jutting out. Her reeking brown teeth curled in a grin of pure glee.
Oh, goody. I was wondering when the author was going to stop mucking about with all of this foreplay and teasing, and move on to the serious-business edgelord stuff.

And, in that regard, he doesn't disappoint:

>And if any of us had the slightest doubt remaining, she blew off U-10’s head with the sawed-off single-barreled shotgun clenched in her jaws. Bits of blood, bone, and brains splattered over both of us as the pink unicorn dropped in a thrashing heap. The mare spat out the gun, casually reloading it as she giggled. “Bang… yer dead…” she slurred around a bloody tongue; it looked… chewed.
Alright, kids, say it with me:

SACREBLEU!! LE EDGE!!

Anyway, Midnight and BJ are understandably a bit taken back by this latest development:

>Midnight stood there stunned and wetting herself.
Stunned and wetting herself? My stars. I've seen ponies stunned, and I've seen ponies wetting themselves, but never at the same time.

>I was not far from that state myself, but, unlike her, I was security.
This sentence is bad and you should feel bad.

Anyway, since BJ is a security mare, her reaction time is slightly better than Midnight's. She attempts to subdue the interloper, but this pony is clearly no stranger to extreme violence. The newcomer easily deflects her attack and disarms her, and BJ ends up on her back with a rusty knife pressed against her throat.

Fortunately, her quick thinking again prevails, and she manages to break the knife using telekinesis. She kills the mare, and the fight is over.

>With a telekinetic shove, I rammed the sharp metal as deep into her throat as I could. Her yellow eyes shot wide as her sliced throat spurted blood over my chest and neck, smearing my barding with her gore.
Technically speaking, I believe "gore" refers to innards or intestines; this is just blood. I'm not 100% certain, though.

>Finally, something gave inside the nightmarish mare, and she slumped limply against me.
Nightmarish mare? Really? Wherever you are, Somber, please slap yourself for that one.

Anyway, BJ examines the corpse and discovers that it is wearing a PipBuck that used to belong to a mare she knew. However, she doesn't have much time to think about it. In walks another mean little pony, whom she swiftly dispatches.

At this point BJ figures out that the Stable is being invaded or raided or something, so she sends Midnight to find and alert Gin Rummy, while she runs off to...do something else. I think.

>>373592

>I grabbed her with my hooves to hold her still, reversing the butt of the gun and bringing it crashing down on her skull. Again. Again. Then two things broke: the butt of the gun and her skull.
Whoever said this fandom's literature was lacking in artistic taste?

Anyway, Midnight goes off to find BJ's mother so they can get everyone to safety, while BJ herself runs off to go kick some ass. I have no idea what her ultimate objective is anymore, and I suspect neither does she.

>I didn’t understand these ponies, if they really were ponies and not some sort of mutant pony-shaped predators of some sort. They reeked. They seemed to revel in bloodshed. I had no idea how they could have penetrated the stable... unless they’d come in when the Overmare opened the door.
Here is my current working theory for what's going on: Stable-Tec is most likely a defunct company that was destroyed by the megaspells along with everything else. However, the ponies inside the stables would have no way of knowing this. The leaders of each stable were likely given a set of instructions to follow, and have continued following them for generations. In the meantime, the world outside the stables has become the dystopian hellscape we all know and love.

What probably happened is that a gang of raiders somehow got in contact with Stable 99's Overmare and told her that they were representatives of Stable-Tec. Since the Overmare in this case is a mentally unstable filly, she probably wasn't all that hard to fool. The raiders convinced her to open the stable doors, because blah blah blah the world is fine now and they can all come out. They also presumably want this EC-1101 file for some unspecified reason. The Overfilly went along with the plan, the stable was opened, and now the raiders are inside killing everypony.

That's my theory at any rate, we'll see if I'm right.

Anywho, Blackjack sends Midnight on her merry way, and then goes off down the hall. She encounters yet another generic goon who jumps out and attempts to horribly murder her; I'm sure we are all well familiar with this routine from the last story. BJ cracks her windpipe with the baton, and the raider goes down, dropping a .38 revolver in the process. BJ is now properly armed.

>She was so dirty I couldn’t tell what color she had been originally. She’d mutilated her own cutie mark.
I hate to nitpick, but how exactly does BJ know that this pony mutilated her own cutie mark? All she would know is that her cutie mark was mutilated. It's a minor detail, but it's important to keep a character's perspective in mind. BJ is not privy to the same omniscience as the author, the reader, or anyone else familiar with the FoE world; she has likely never seen a raider before, and has no idea how they normally behave.

>Air Duct and her filly Vent were laying still on the floor… but the smears of blood… holes chewed in the blue filly’s side… the blood splashed about.
Were they laying down the law prior to being eviscerated? If not, then Air Duct and her filly were lying still. Alternatively, you could also say "Air Duct and her filly lay still on the floor."

Anyway, edge edge edge. The raider tries to take a bite out of BJ's leg, and there is an implication that the raiders in this story are cannibalistic, in addition to being psycho killers and chronic bedwetters and whatever other silly nonsense that kkat established.

>Oh, puking now. I couldn’t help myself, my lunch coming up in the doorway.
This passage is objectively bad for several reasons, but oddly enough I like the way it reads. It has the ring of a Burroughs cut-up or a zen koan.

>“I can’t stand these sick fuckers,” a stallion said from the stairs above me. That it was a stallion made me guess that they weren’t quite the same ponies as before. “Murdering, psychopathic rapists the lot of ‘em.” Maybe there was the possibility of negotiation?
>“Look at it this way: they’ll exhaust themselves killing every last motherfucking pony in here, and then we can get rid of them easily,” a mare answered, snuffing any thoughts of working out a deal before continuing callously, “Deus gets that program he wants so desperately. My boss is happy. The Reapers are happy. Everypony wins.”
It appears that the situation may actually be more complicated than what I described above.

>“Makes me wonder what’s so damned special about it,” the stallion muttered as I crept up the stairs. “Deus just grabs a dozen of us at random from the arena, trots us out here, fetches these nutjob raiders, and waits for the stupid cunt to open the door?”
However, it seems like the basic gist of what I came up with is probably close to the truth.

Anyway, what the fuck. BJ overhears these two ponies, who appear to be the ringleaders behind the raider attack (though not raiders themselves, assuming that distinction matters), and then they notice her eavesdropping. BJ fires, gets a lucky shot, and that's another one down. She tries to pull the same trick again with the second pony, except her gun suddenly stops working:

>the revolver gave an unhealthy ping of rust and stopped, hammer drawn back.
I'm not quite sure what's supposed to be happening here, but this sounds like bullshit. My understanding is that the whole point of a revolver is that it's not supposed to jam up like this. However, I honestly don't know that much about guns, so I could be wrong. Maybe if you let a gun like this go to shit for long enough it rusts up and becomes unusable; idk. If anyone wants to weigh in, feel free.

Anyway, she grabs the dead mare's weapon, but it turns out to be something called a "beam gun," which she doesn't know how to use, so she uses it as a melee weapon instead. Since the other guy, for some reason, is only armed with a piece of rebar, this means that it's a more or less even fight.

>>373594

Whoops, spoke too soon. It actually turns out that the beam gun doesn't work that well as a melee weapon, though I'm not sure why:

>I barely brought the beam thingy up in time to block the tip. There was a flash, a fizzle, and the metal spur continued on with no hesitation right into my flesh.
Not quite sure what's going on here; it sounds like the rebar actually went through the beam gun, as though it were incorporeal or something. Either that or she didn't fully block the attack, and the bar grazed her.

Anyway, the evil pony is about to run BJ through with a piece of rebar, when suddenly her mother shows up and makes an appropriately theatrical entrance. She blows a hole through his chest, and that's all they wrote of Generic Thug #2.

>I stared at his body as all those thoughts I’d stuffed into that mental closet started to tear down the door. My throat began to work as I stared at the draining holes in his head. I had to do something… something… scream… vomit… wet myself… curl up in a ball sucking my hoof till this was all over. Something!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kN7EyPBmrI

>“I still don’t know what’s going on or how these… things… got in here,” she said as she checked her sidearm. “Somepony taught them the basics of how to use PipBucks. They went right for security ponies’ quarters. I’m just glad they didn’t get far.”
I'm still a little curious where she was all of this time. I'm guessing if the Overfilly was working with this Deus character, then she probably left Gin Rummy out of the loop deliberately. However, that still doesn't answer the question of why she wasn't in her quarters.

>Distracted by all the foals to slaughter. Damn it, if I’d just been faster I could have… done… done something!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK-loCEmzyw

Anywho, BJ and her mom yak back and forth for a bit, and we start to get a somewhat clearer picture of what probably happened. The Overfilly, being the paranoid little twat that she is, was worried about Rivets and the other Maintenance ponies leading a rebellion. So, she contacted some sketchy group of outsiders and hired them to take care of Rivets. They agreed to do this in exchange for this EC-1101 file that keeps coming up. However, it appears that for some unexplained reason the mercenary group decided to pull the ol' doublecross, and murder everypony in the stable.

BJ suggests that, since thanks to Midnight she now knows where to find the EC-1101 file, they should retrieve this file and see if they can use it to lure the mercenaries away. I have no idea how they intend to do this, and neither does BJ. However, it's as good a plan as any, so off they go.

They make it to the Atrium, but unfortunately the way is blocked by some kind of gigantic pony cyborg:

> A thing of pony and metal. Hydraulics braced the metal plates attached to its hide as it stepped forward. For all its mass, it seemed to trot almost effortlessly. Red eyes stared at where Lock had been blown to pieces. Two huge guns pointed over its shoulders, cannons built into its body.
Oh yeah, another security pony named Lock also got blown into bloody chunks.

Anyway, it seems like the way back to Security (which is where I think they are trying to go, though don't quote me) is temporarily blocked by a miniboss. However, BJ has a plan.

Page break. The plan, it turns out, is for Blackjack to dress up like the mare she killed earlier, the not-raider who appeared to be leading the mercenary group. Then, she will sneak into that place where the thing is, the maneframe with the EC-1101 file on it, transfer the file to her PipBuck, and then run outside, hoping that the mercenaries will follow her. This seems like kind of a retarded plan, since unless I'm completely misunderstanding how the computer systems in this universe work, all she's really doing is making a copy of the file and then leaving the building; presumably the original file would still be present on the maneframe. But we'll put a pin in that for now.

Anywho, she puts on her disguise and heads back to the Atrium. All the enemies are wearing stolen PipBucks, which are capable of detecting hostiles, but for some reason they don't register BJ as an enemy. Even though the text points this issue out, it doesn't offer an explanation, so I guess we'll just put a pin in that too. More important, however, is that the big cyborg pony seems to be a little less easy to fool. It demands to know why BJ, or "Two Bits" as the pony she is disguising herself as was called, is up here instead of downstairs murdering everyone.

She manages to come up with a lame excuse about how she broke her gun, which for some reason everypony buys. However, things take an unexpected turn:

>With shocking speed it swatted the gun out of my mouth, and suddenly the only ponies laughing were the yellowed-eyed mangy ponies with their insane giggles. “Cunt doesn’t have her gun. Cunt is useless, then. Cunt should be fucked, huh, Cunt?”
Apparently, the cyborg is from Australia.

>I suddenly became very aware of one part of him that wasn’t mechanical. A part that I was fairly sure was going to be inside me in a few seconds.
What? The rapey cyborg doesn't even have a mechanical robot weener? What a ripoff. I want my money back.

>I became aware of a whimper and looked over at a prone white shape. The Overmare. One of the filthy, yellow-eyed ponies was pinning her down and raping her, her mouth and flanks bloody.
Well, color me impressed. Iirc kkat didn't get around to tossing foal rape scenes into his story until Chapter 3 or so, meanwhile Somber is getting right down to business. It's pretty clear who the Ultimate Edgelord is. But will Blackjack be able to top Littlepip in terms of sanctimonious moralizing? Will she prove as adept at completely and utterly raping the entire concept of physics? Will her group of friends be as bland and uninteresting? How will this story ultimately stack up against its predecessor? Stick around and find out.

>>373597
Post-post-modern classic rape. A classic. What rousing speech will BJ Blaskowitz say to have the filly mare up and defeat the invaders?

>>373597

>The idea was utterly alien to me, and I did all I could to tear my eyes away and hide my horror. Mares might occasionally force another mare against her will, a class A crime, but for a stallion to do that to a mare was… focus, Blackjack!
I haven't addressed this much, but there's a strong implication of a female-dominant pecking order in this stable. It's already been clarified that males are reserved for breeding stock and females do all of the important jobs, but it seems that the philosophy permeates deeper into their social order. In the original FoE the various stables were all sociology experiments, with each one designed to test out some theory of social organization to see which one worked best. As I recall, there was some kind of male-dominant stable; presumably this one is meant to be its counterpart.

Anyway, Blackjack manages to avoid >rape by promising to go upstairs and retrieve this mysterious file that everypony seems so gung-ho about. We are also introduced to a mysterious unicorn who appears to be working with the invaders. However, there is a twist: due to his cutie mark and Pip-Buck, he appears to be a male from this very stable. Presumably, he didn't find a lifetime of idle sex to be to his liking, and decided to join up with these rogues instead.

This unicorn offers to go along with Blackjack to retrieve the file, and in order to avoid blowing her cover she has little choice but to accept his help. They go off to wherever they're going, the security room I think, only to find that the entrance has been barricaded by Daisy and (I think) Marmalade.

It is here that Blackjack makes a tragic faux-pas. She accidentally uses Daisy's name, which strikes the unicorn male (whose name is U-21 if that matters) as unusual. He then recognizes Blackjack the security mare. In order to preserve her disguise, BJ is forced to clonk him unconscious.

>I ran up to the security level and heard the yelling and banging. There was a door that divided the Overmare’s office, armory, and some utility rooms from detention, briefing, and the gun range. The door itself had been forced open, but Daisy had barricaded it with a desk.
As an aside, I'm having a bit of difficulty extrapolating where all of these locations are meant to be in physical space from the author's descriptions. This may be one of those areas where it helps to have some knowledge of the Fallout games; I'm assuming the designs of the stables are similar to the designs of whatever the bomb-shelter places in the games were called.

Anyway, the unicorn guy is unconscious I think, and now BJ goes up to the blocked security door. A bunch of the raiders are in the process of trying to knock it down. She manages to wrangle a shotgun away from one of them, then blasts another in the face. The one she killed was one of the intelligent non-raider enemies, if that matters. I'm still a little foggy on what exactly is going on here, but I get the impression it's meant to be a little foggy.

>Time returned, moving as if in molasses. The Stable-Tec Assisted Targeting Spell slowly discharged, and I watched the cone of lead fan out in a narrow wedge of death. I watched his flesh pulverize and tear away around each pellet, his head deform, and blood and bone fly away behind him. The second shot repeated the devastation, and I watched in horrified fascination as his head detached completely and he dropped like a sack of meat.
Sacrebleu! Le edge!

Anywho, I think there were a total of three raiders, and she just killed one of them. The other two come at her, and she gets hit in the shoulder by a baseball bat with rusty nails driven through it. Great, so on top of everything else, now she's going to need a tetanus shot.

>The shotgun held five more shells, and I pumped them out as rapidly as I could, the buckshot peppering them with oozing wounds. It was nowhere near as effective as those first two shots, though; S.A.T.S.’s accuracy was truly terrifying. I was glad that none of these ponies seemed to have access to it or knew what it could do.
Ah, my old friend plot armor, how I've missed you.

Anywhooooooo, she pumps shotgun rounds into her two assailants, one of them goes down eventually, the other one attacks her, but she strangles her or hits her or something, and I guess that's the end of them. She then jumps the barricade (why the raiders trying to break through didn't just do that in the first place is never explained). At this point, due to her being in disguise, she is shot in the butt by Marmalade after she vaults in Vaults! That's what the bomb-shelter thingies in Fallout were called. One might expect Marmalade to have figured out that something was amiss when "Two Bit" suddenly began attacking her own cohorts, but we'll put a pin in that for now.

>I slumped as I heard the barricade being drawn back. The red bar wasn’t moving towards the door. Maybe she was waiting for help to arrive? It didn’t matter. In just a second, Daisy would--
Wait, it looks like BJ hasn't actually jumped the barricade yet. I'm not sure how she was shot from behind, then, but we'll put a pin in that as well. Nice to see this author's fight scenes are at least as coherent as kkat's.

ANYWHOWOWOWOW, while I have absolutely no idea where BJ is supposed to be in physical space at this point, it's clear enough at least that she's finished off the raiders and gotten past the barricade. She is now in...the security room? I think? Anyway, at this point she gets jumped by Daisy, who whacks her a few times with her security baton.

Blackjack announces that she is not Two Bit, but Blackjack, cleverly disguised as Two Bit. Daisy says "I know," and keeps wailing on her with the baton. It seems she's still pissed off about that whole thing from earlier. Eventually she stops, and BJ explains her convoluted plan to download the security file and then run, hoping that the raiders will chase after her instead of just downloading their own copy.

>>373737

>“P-21? Are you here?” I asked as I pulled it on. I gave Marmalade a grateful smile.
>“That useless cock pony?” Daisy snorted.
>“You called?” P-21 said dryly as he stepped out of the door to Maintenance One.
Hey, I was just beginning to wonder what happened to that guy. Turns out he was in Maintenance One all along, which I'm assuming is Stable slang for the bathroom.

>There was an unmistakable smug look on his face at the shocked expression on Daisy’s face.
This sentence is bad and you should feel bad.

Anyway, fuck. The P-21 guy comes out of nowhere at a plot-convenient moment, and for some reason assumes that Blackjack has betrayed him, even though as far as I can tell she is more or less following their original plan.

>I looked at P-21. “The plan’s changed a little. You’re still getting out of here, but I’m going with you.”
Oh, I see. The plan's changed a little. Wait, what exactly was the plan originally again? Get a file, and then go outside, right? Is that...not what they're doing anymore?

Anyway, there's some pointless back and forth. P-21 doesn't want Blackjack to go outside with him, Daisy makes light of Blackjack's weight, Marmalade accuses Blackjack of harlotry, and ultimately it is decided that Blackjack will, in fact, be going outside with P-21. Well, I'm glad we got that all sorted out.

Anyway, there's some more pointless back and forth, as well as a poorly-executed joke about sodomy. Long story short, BJ gets that security-file thingy copied onto her PipBuck, finally. As an added bonus, P-21 copies a bunch of the Overmare's personal files as well, which I'm assuming are mostly porn. Also, I have no idea how or why P-21 is so adept at using the stable's computers, but we'll put a pin in that for now.

>Then he pushed one more button.
>The stable around me vanished as my E.F.S. went crazy! “Whoa whoa whoa! Hey, what’s going on!” Columns of numbers and diagrams and maps and -- what the hell was that supposed to be?! -- all flashed by one after the other. Then, as quickly as it began, it ended. A tiny cursor appeared.
>Permanent transfer completed.
>EC-1101 transferred.
>Warning: unknown encryption detected.
>Warning: biomedical peripheral insufficient.
>Warning: navigational data unavailable.
>Warning: Equestrianet data connection not available.
>Please commence manual transmission.
Yeah, I have absolutely no fucking idea what's going on anymore. I guess he tried to install Gentoo for her and it didn't work out so well. In any case, it looks like Blackjack is just as confused as I am:

>I opened my mouth to see if a smart pony might have an explanation for what just happened
Unless you have eyes on your tongue, you don't open your mouth to see. Moreover, the presence of an explanation is not something that can be detected by vision. This sentence is terrible and you should feel terrible.

Anywhoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, it looks like that robot-guy from earlier, Deus, got tired of waiting and started blowing shit up. They need to get moving if they want to avoid being kerploded and probably >raped, though not necessarily in that order. They go into the Overmare's office, because apparently that room is adjacent to the one they're currently in.

>Though it looked like somepony had pissed all over the Overmare’s huge ring-shaped desk, it was still intact, as was an old piece of paper taped behind it.
Okay, seriously: I remember this coming up in the other story a lot, but what exactly is the deal with raiders pissing and shitting on everything? It didn't make sense in kkat's story, and it doesn't make sense now. Although to be fair, I suppose if you really have to go, the Overmare's desk is probably as good a place as any.

Anywhizzle, the paper on the desk turns out to be a list the Overfilly made of her enemies. BJ observes that both her mother's name and her own name are on it. Then, she punches in a door code her mother gave her earlier, and the desk lifts up to reveal a hidden staircase. She and P-21 head down, and the desk moves back into place.

>The entry hatch to the stable, a massive cog-tooth-edged slab of metal, was rolled away to one side, and a long rough-rock-walled tunnel led up beyond. Bones lay crushed on the other side of the door, mashed by the entry of Deus and his raiders.
Ah yes, the ol' skeleton-lined entry tunnel. Pretty sure these were a standard feature of all Stable-Tec constructions.

Anyway, blah blah blah, she makes it to the outside. However, instead of leaving, she tells P-21 to go on ahead, and then goes back to the atrium. Apparently, the entry tunnel connects directly to the atrium, thus making the secret passage hidden under the desk kind of pointless. The layout of this place is still confusing as all fuck. In any event, she goes back inside, yells to get the cyberpony's attention, announces that she has the security file, and then runs outside. Cyberpony takes the bait as intended, and BJ is now running for her life.

The chapter ends here.

>Footnote: Level Up.
>New Perk: Rapid Reload - All your weapon reloads are 25% faster than normal.
Oh for fuck's sake, are we seriously doing this shit again?

Anyway, this seems like a good stopping point for now. When I return, I have some thoughts about the opening chapter of this story before we move on.
pic unrelated, I just thought it was funny

>>373738

Hey all, sorry I've been neglecting this. Mostly this is due to my diverting more and more time to my own writing projects, coupled with good old fashioned procrastination/laziness. If it's any consolation, one of the projects I've been focusing on is the rewrite of that old Dale Gribble green from eons ago that anons will periodically ask about. I've begun posting it in its own thread.

Anyway, back to it. Before we move on to the next chapter, I'd actually like to briefly contrast what we've read so far with the original Fallout: Equestria story.

The premise of this story is almost identical to kkat's: the protagonist is a misfit unicorn living in a Stable, who sucks at magic and doesn't like her job. She has a lesbian crush on another mare who lives in the Stable with her. One day, she decides to leave the Stable because reasons.

I have a couple of guesses as to why Somber chose to use this format. The first is that it seems to follow the structure of the actual Fallout games. From what I've seen, they pretty much all start out with the player character living in a vault, and then leaving for some reason or other. The second is that, to my understanding, this was the first actual FoE spinoff story written by someone other than kkat. In other words, it was basically a fanfic of a fanfic. As such, the author is trying to appeal to the audience of the original fic, and is likely to end up imitating it to some degree. In the same way that kkat's story was largely modeled after Fallout 3, I'm assuming large portions of this story will be modeled on kkat's FoE.

That said, I'm actually a little surprised by how much stronger this story is so far compared to its predecessor. One of my early gripes about FoE was that we never got much of a sense of what Littlepip's life was like in the Stable. There's very little depth to her character in the early chapters; all we really know is that she hates her job and has a crush on Velvet Remedy. As a setting, the Stable is also very poorly fleshed out.

When LP eventually returns to the stable, and ends up confronting her alcoholic mother and whatever the fuck else, most of the intended emotional punch is lost due to there having been absolutely no setup for any of this. LP's alcoholic mother does not even appear in the story until LP returns to the Stable to confront her. Also, we are never really given a sense of how life in the Stable actually compares with life in the Wasteland. This gives rise to a lot of confusion later on: for instance, it's not entirely clear how much Littlepip is actually supposed to know about the outside world and its history. For most of the story LP appears to be wandering around the ruins trying to figure out what happened to the world, yet at other points she seems weirdly knowledgeable about certain things. How much does she know about the war? About Equestria before the war? About the M6 and their various roles in government? We are never told, and it's not clear what we should assume. There are other questions too: Velvet Remedy's admiration of Fluttershy is a major part of her character, but it's never really clarified how she could reasonably know about Fluttershy. How much of the world's history were the Stable ponies aware of? Should Velvet have even known who Fluttershy was in the first place?

Somber hasn't really clarified any of that either, but he does do a much better job of establishing both Blackjack as a character, and Stable 99 as a setting.

When the story opens, BJ is a security pony who has lived her entire life inside this Stable. She seems to understand on some vague level that a major cataclysm took place at some point in the distant past, and the world outside is not safe. However, she doesn't seem to know the specifics; all she knows is that it's not safe to go out there. At this point, the outside world is not yet important; BJ's entire life so far has taken place in Stable 99, and all the events we witness revolve around that place and its inhabitants.

The author also does quite a bit more to paint us a picture of life inside this Stable. This place has its own internal rules and social structure, and the story's events turn around the assorted politics and conflicts that arise from that. Again: the outside world exists, and we have a sense it will be important, but it's not the focus yet.

It's clearly established that this Stable is rather badly run and has a lot of problems. The chain of command and organizational structure is strange. It's a female-dominated society; males are relegated purely to breeding roles and have no other jobs and no apparent social status. Each female has an assigned job, with assignments being determined by heredity rather than ability. The ponies still have cutie marks that designate special talents, but the talents don't seem to affect what role a pony will be assigned to. Thus, you have rather goofy situations like an obviously immature filly being made Overmare of the entire Stable. Procedure is clearly valued over function here. The setup actually reminds me a little of Futurama, where each person is assigned a career chip.

From reading the original FoE, we know that the Stables were social experiments engineered by the CMC, so presumably the wacky rules of this place are related to the parameters of an experiment. However, at this point in Project Horizons, we don't know this; all we know is that BJ lives in a place with weird, apparently dysfunctional rules.

BJ's character arc so far has revolved around her rivalry with Daisy, her obvious inadequacy at her assigned role, and her relationship with her mother. She seems torn between a sense of duty to the Stable, which seems to have been mostly ingrained into her, and a vague desire to forge her own path. This is set against the backdrop of a clearly dysfunctional, failing society. It's obvious something has to change, we're just not sure what yet.

>>374312

There's one last thing from Ch 1 I'd like to call attention to before moving on. One piece of writing advice you will hear constantly is "show, don't tell." What this means is that you should convey mood and feeling through actions and dialogue, rather than relying on excessive description. In other words, instead of telling the reader that your character is feeling happy or sad or whatever, have them say or do something which shows how they are feeling.

With that in mind, I'd like to highlight the following short scene:

>I trotted past a row of gurgling pieces of equipment barely lit by wan yellow spark lamps. Knowing my luck, the yellow bar ahead of me was actually one or two floors above me. If I was lucky, I could get through this shift without any more disasters and, if I was really lucky, talk to Mom and not the head security mare about the rising tension. The former might be able to do something. The latter would have to crack down on Rivets, or, worse, tell the Overmare.

>Then I heard a faint sniff and soft sobs over the hum of the equipment. Looked like I’d found my pony. “Okay, come on out and let’s get you up to security. A quick shot and it’ll be all over.”

>The sniffling stopped, and then a tiny olive filly with teal eyes peeked out at me. My jaw dropped as I saw the pain and fear in her eyes. “Oh! Ah… you’re not… ahem…” I sat hard and rubbed my head. Could this night get any worse? “You’re not supposed to be down here. It’s dangerous and after curfew. Where’s your momma?”

>She just stared at me, and her eyes dropped to her hooves. “Recycled…” was all she blubbered. She touched her PipBuck and her ID flashed. ‘Scotch Tape, Maintenance Shift C’.

>Oh… I tried to think up some creative profanity but… eh… I got nothing. “Oh… well… ah…” What was I supposed to do? If this was Duct Tape’s kid, then she was supposed to be here. Should I say something about her mom? Give her a hug? Tell her she’s doing a good job? Tell her not to be a cryfilly? “Um… sorry about your mom. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it.” I grinned at her as she clenched her eyes closed, pulled a wrench from her barding, and nodded before trotting back between the massive round machines.

One of my biggest gripes about FoE was the way kkat used over-the-top violence and tragedy to try and force emotion in his story. Horrific but implausible events were thrown in left and right for obvious shock value: a group of foals having a cutecenara party in the middle of a Steel Ranger invasion, then getting predictably massacred; a pack of raiders taking over Fluttershy's cottage and using it to stage caged death-matches between foals; a single colt somehow running down and overpowering a grown mare (who was wandering around a dangerous area alone and unarmed for some unexplained reason), then proceeding to rape her even while being shot at; the list goes on and on. The effect was usually the exact opposite of what was intended. I generally found that the parts of FoE that made me laugh the hardest were the parts that were supposed to make me cry.

While there is obviously some edgelord stuff in PH, and I suspect it's only going to get worse as the story goes on, it's worth pointing out that it's possible to convey that your setting is a harsh, nasty place to live without needing to throw sadism and rape and decapitation into every scene. The bit I quoted above does a nice job of conveying the ordinary day-to-day misery of life in this place, without hamming it up to the point where it becomes unintentionally comical.

Blackjack, who is not really cut out for her role as security mare in the first place, is trying to do her job by searching for the escaped stallion, presumably so he can then be killed and recycled. She follows a blip on her radar which she thinks is the stallion, only to discover it's a young filly. She chides her for being somewhere potentially dangerous, and asks where her mother is, which is a normal thing to do in that situation. The filly replies that her mother is dead, then identifies herself as the daughter of a character whose death was referenced earlier. BJ realizes that she has unintentionally reminded this filly of something painful, and feels bad about it, but there's not much else she can do except awkwardly apologize and let her get back to work.

It's a simple scene, only a brief interaction and a few lines of dialog, but it does a perfect job of conveying just how fucked up this place really is. The maintenance job this filly is doing is probably dangerous; it's established that her mother was killed performing a similar task (I believe she was technically killed by the explosion of a malfunctioning terminal). She's also grieving, and I'm sure she would just as soon not be alone in a dank basement performing dangerous maintenance work right now. However, she doesn't have much choice; that's just how things work around here. Her mother died, so now the filly has to take over her job; simple as.

That said, it's not a perfectly executed scene. For instance, this sentence is bad and you should feel bad:
>My jaw dropped as I saw the pain and fear in her eyes.

I would also probably cut this bit:
>What was I supposed to do? If this was Duct Tape’s kid, then she was supposed to be here. Should I say something about her mom? Give her a hug? Tell her she’s doing a good job? Tell her not to be a cryfilly?
It's not necessarily bad, but I think it's unnecessary. The significance of what's happening comes through well enough with just the bare-bones interactions and dialogue; we don't need to hear BJ's inner thoughts.

I would probably also tone down the sniffling and crying that the filly is doing. Again, the interactions and dialogue conveys the emotion in this scene quite well on its own. Anything else is just adding a layer of extra schmaltz that doesn't need to be there. It's like adding a sad violin track to a scene that's already sad enough on its own.

>>374314

Anyway, let's move on. We've got a long, long road ahead of us.

Chapter 2: Trust

>Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
>By Somber
>Chapter 2: Trust
Seriously, nigger, don't do shit like this. We already know that the story is called "Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons"; I doubt anyone is going to confuse this story for "Rainbow Dash's Crusty Cunt Flakes." We already know the author's name is Somber; it's in the auto-generated fimfiction masthead at the top of the page, right next to the fucking title. We already know we're on Chapter 2; even if we didn't, we could probably deduce it from the fact that we just finished reading Chapter 1 and clicked "next." This story is already a literal million words long, you don't need to be padding word count.

>“In the end, we all have to trust in something…”
Regrettably, this seems to be another area in which Somber is trying to imitate kkat's format. Remember how every chapter of FoE opened with an unattributed quotation in italics, and I used to spend a paragraph or two per chapter speculating on who might have said this mysterious phrase and why? It appears that Somber has decided to do something similar here, only with uglier formatting and even vaguer quotations. At least kkat centered his.

Anyway, if this chapter's epigraph as opposed to an epitaph; see how I remember things? is to be believed, this chapter will involve trusting. Trusting in something. What could that something be? And who is the one doing all that trusting? Well, I guess we'll just have to keep reading and find out.

So in that vein, we rejoin Blackjack and P-21 as they flee the stable, a giant mechanical cyborg hot on their tails. A couple of raider-invaders are naturally guarding the exit, but thanks to our old friend plot armor S.A.T.S., BJ is able to make short work of them and continue running.

We are told that they run for five minutes; I'm not sure if we're meant to take this literally or not. I'm also not sure how they manage to outrun the cyberpony for that long, seeing as how it has mechanical legs and would presumably be much faster. Also, it is probably shooting missiles and whatnot at them, which would also be something of an issue. But we'll put a pin in that for now.

Anyway, after exactly five minutes of running, P-21 injures his leg or something and he starts limping and slowing down. BJ has a brief moment where she considers leaving him behind, then decides to be nice and help him instead. They continue to run.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ7NVjZ-Eyg

Suddenly, some kind of mechanical insect appears and advises them to turn left. I don't remember what they are called, but I believe it's meant to be one of those flying mechanical drones that Spike/Watcher/Frank used in the first story. BJ is understandably confused, but decides to do what it says. They turn left, and find a ruined house.

>We came to a house. Well, if you could still count two standing walls, a toilet, and a bathtub as a house. I tried to ignore the pony skeleton curled up in the tub as we ducked behind the wall.
Oh boy, it's got skeletons too. Somber is just going right down the FoE checklist.

Anyway, the mysterious talking metal insect now advises them to hide.

>“But--” I started to say when I heard a panicked cry to the south.
How do you know which direction the panicked cry is coming from? You've never been outside before, remember? Do you have a compass in that PipBuck thingie you've got? Do you have time to stop and look at it while a giant evil robot is chasing you? Would you have the presence of mind to check it if you did? Would ascertaining the cardinal direction a voice is coming from really be your first priority in your current situation?

>Not my voice, but definitely a terrified mare.
Ooh, a skeleton and a terrified mare, and we're only on Chapter 2! Is she getting raped and murdered? I'll bet she's getting raped and murdered.

>I almost started after it when I realized that it had the same tinny buzz as the bug. A second later, Deus and four raiders galloped past.
Nope, false alarm. Oh well, we've still got a good 1,757,260 words left to go; I'm sure there will be rape and murder aplenty.

Anyway, it sounds like the robo-bug is pretending to be a screaming mare in order to lead the giant death robot and his minions away from our intrepid heroes. Then, this happens:

>I can’t explain it, but when I looked into the sky, I thought it’d be like the atrium ceiling. Instead, there was just this great big emptiness above me with distant gray that blurred into obscurity. Despite my head being tilted back, I felt like I was looking down. My brain screamed at me that if I took so much as a step I was going to fall into that immense nothing. I hate to admit that, after everything I’d been through, it was just the simple sky that made me wet my barding.
I remember Littlepip having occasional bouts of acrophobia, which kkat called agoraphobia. I was never quite sure what the deal with that was supposed to be, or why she was supposed to have it, but I think the basic reasoning is that a Stable pony, having never seen the open sky, might be overwhelmed by the vastness of the outside world. Makes sense I suppose. Anyway, my main point is that Somber seems to do a slightly better job of conveying this point than kkat did.

Anyway, she has her little dizzy spell, then it passes, and then the robo-bug comes back.

>“You can call me Watcher. As for what, this is just a spritebot. You’ll find them wandering all over the Wasteland. I just took some in this area over when I noticed you two helping each other.”
Spritebots; that's what those things are called. Anyway, it looks like our old buddy Frank is in this story as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wgx4AoIw5M

>>374316

Frank and BJ yak for a bit. Not a whole lot comes out of the conversation. A couple of sly references to Littlepip and her group are thrown in, suggesting that the timeline of this story is either contemporaneous with FoE, or takes place sometime shortly afterward. Since FoE ended with the Gardens of Equestria being fired off and life in the Wasteland improving, and in this setting this is clearly not the case, we can probably place this story somewhere within the same timeframe as the events of FoE.

Anyway, Frank advises BJ to make friends, and compliments her on already finding one. BJ then clarifies that she and P-21 are not actually friends, because who would want to be friends with a loser like that, amirite? Frank seems disappointed by this, and tells her she should reconsider. He also advises her to find guns, ammo, armor, etc etc. He also tells her to go West for some reason.

>I looked over at P-21 and then looked down at my PipBuck. Watcher had said we should go west? I knew that my PipBuck had a navigation function, but until now I’d never actually needed it. Loading the map, I noticed two interesting things. First, there was a little icon of a gear marked ‘Stable 99’, and secondly, there was a location tag off to the west.
Unfortunately, it looks like this story will be also be following the "open world video game" structure. Hopefully there will at least be a little bit more of a main plot to thread the endless mini-quests around.

>“Well, I guess west is better than south,” I said as I rose, keeping my eyes firmly towards the dirt.
Why?

Those questions aside, it seems they might have bigger fish to fry at the moment. BJ now observes that P-21 is crying like a little bitch. When she asks him why he is being such a giant fucking pussy, he shows her his leg that was giving him trouble earlier. The injury appears serious.

> Aside from the most basic first aid, I didn’t have a clue what to do. I had healing potions, but they were for immediate injuries. The kind of damage that had been done to his knee needed major magic.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that healing magic in this story is going to be at least somewhat less ridiculous than in the original.

Anyway, P-21 continues to bitch and moan, until eventually they hear voices approaching. It turns out to be more goons from the raider group, probably looking for their boss. They brought along that other male, U-21, who appeared briefly in the previous chapter. I'm not sure why.

>“Shut up! Do all stable ponies whine this much? ‘Please don’t kill me, I don’t wanna die. Please don’t rape my ass! It hurts, don’t do that.’ Bitch bitch bitch...” a stallion said sharply. “Now hurry up. When we find the big guy, he’ll decide what we do.” U-21 shouted off a few more protests as they continued off to the south.
Oh I see, south is the direction the cyborg pony went; that's why BJ doesn't want to go that way.

Anyway, P-21 doesn't want to go anywhere with BJ for some reason, but BJ points out that he won't get far with his injury. He continues whining and bitching like an effeminate pussy for a bit longer, and then agrees to go west with BJ.

Page break. We rejoin the two of them three hours later. They are trudging across the wasteland. Trudge trudge trudge.

>It didn’t matter, as I’d never see them again, but I felt homesick. I wanted to be able to look forward to Rivets’s next game. I longed for my boring and uneventful night shift. I remembered how thrilled I had been at the idea of being on the surface and wanted to kick myself.
Once again, we find this story following the same basic format of its predecessor, but also doing a slightly better job with the same subject matter.

In FoE, the events of the story kick off when Velvet Remedy, the Stable's resident celebrity, mysteriously runs off one day. Littlepip, who has a crush on Velvet, goes chasing after her to find out why she left, ostensibly providing the protagonist with an objective that could have driven the events of the early story. However, for reasons unknown, the author has her give up on this objective almost immediately. She then proceeds to spend the next several chapters wandering aimlessly around the Wasteland, doing basically nothing except murdering bad guys in increasingly gruesome ways. Eventually she bumps into Velvet Remedy by sheer random chance, and discovers that her reason for running away was completely mundane and stupid anyway, thus killing the mystery and deflating what little potential was left for a larger plot at that point in the story. Velvet then teams up with LP and her new friend Calamity, and the three of them proceed to wander aimlessly around the Wasteland, slaughtering assorted bad guys with no apparent objective in mind. Eventually, around chapter 13 or 14, the vague outline of something I will generously call a plot begins to take shape.

In PH, while the characters and setting are considerably better developed in the early part of the story, BJ is propelled into the Wasteland on a much flimsier pretext than LP. Her Stable is suddenly invaded by a mysterious group, who are after some kind of data file stored on the maneframe. BJ copies this file onto her PipBuck and then runs, creating a diversion that leads the invaders away from the Stable. Why the invaders would not be able to simply copy the file for themselves instead of chasing her is never explained.

In any case, now that she's outside, it's not entirely clear what she's supposed to do. Frank told her she should "go west," and while he doesn't elaborate on why, that probably works well enough as a short-term objective. Also, she still has the data file, and we still don't know exactly what it is or why the invaders wanted it in the first place. Presumably, they are still looking for her. Assuming the author doesn't decide to just tank his own premise for no good reason the way kkat did, there's probably enough substance here to build a larger story.

>>374329

>We hadn’t come across anything too serious yet. Some fat bloated fly things had spat nasty thorns at us. I didn’t waste rounds after the first one; the butt of the pump action was more than sufficient. When I put their carcasses in my bag (well, we’d have to eat at some point; not that I was at all confident that they were edible, but they’d be better than air or dirt and quite possibly better than two-centuries-dead grass), my PipBuck’s inventory system labeled them ‘Bloatsprite Meat’. There was even a ‘value’ next to it. How the heck would my PipBuck know the value (in a totally unknown economic situation) of a bug it’d never seen before? I should ask Midnight how--
Having now played a few hours into the original Fallout game, I find it a little easier to understand why the author is bothering to tell us all of this extraneous nonsense. However, it doesn't make reading about it any less tedious.

In an open world RPG, there is going to be lots of wandering around, bumping into random monsters, killing them, collecting their hides, trading their hides for coins or bottle caps or whatever the fuck stupid currency, buying potions and provisions with the coins, and so forth. When you're actually playing a game and doing all of this stuff yourself, it's engaging and part of the fun. When you're just reading about someone else doing all of it, it's considerably less so. Davy Crockett presumably spent a fair portion of his time trapping animals, selling their pelts to Indians, stocking up on deerskin shirts, washing his balls off in creeks maybe once or twice a month, and doing numerous other mundane tasks. However, the assorted writers responsible for transforming the events of his life into fiction wisely left most of this out, and just focused on the exciting parts of his adventures. Remember: we don't need to witness literally every action your characters perform.

Anyway, fuck. BJ and her pathetic little bitch of a companion continue heading west. They come across a soggy, flooded area and consider having a bath, but the water turns out to be irradiated. However, they also come across a mostly-intact farmhouse, and decide to rest. From the descriptions of the knickknacks inside, I get the impression this is supposed to be the ruins of the Apple family farm. Once again, the story is following the structure of FoE fairly closely; I seem to recall Littlepip coming across the Apple farm shortly after leaving the Stable as well.

>The mares were cute enough, I supposed. Something about the one with the three apples made me imagine a little fun flank spank. The male... no... what was the word? Brother? He was pretty delicious. I could really eat his apple.
Apparently, Blackjack is meant to be some kind of bisexual or something. Like her predecessor Littlepip, she seems to have sex on the brain almost constantly. Interestingly, P-21 rebukes her for this.

Anyway, not a whole lot happens here. The main takeaway is that the old photographs show a starkly different family dynamic from what BJ and P-21 are accustomed to. P-21 is shocked to see males occupying military and familial roles, rather than simply being used for breeding and amusement by females.

>Pissiest... male... ever… “I was just trying to lighten the mood,” I said in a softer voice. He blinked, then resumed his grumpy frown. Midnight. Why couldn’t I have run out of the stable with a beautiful dark unicorn mare? Really? If you were going to have a travelling companion, it’d be hard to beat that. Or a pony with a sense of humor. Was that too much to ask?
The author seems to be setting up some kind of frenemy dynamic between BJ and P-21. Once again, it is implied that P-21 may have had a romantic relationship with Duct Tape the mare, not the tape. P-21 is a pretty unlikable character so far, but his wussy, whiny attitude mostly seems to be a result of the warped gender roles of Stable 99. It may be interesting to see where he ends up. Hopefully, Somber will put a little more effort into developing his side characters than kkat did.

Anyway, there's a terminal in here, so P-21 starts monkeying around with it to see if he can get it to work. Meanwhile, BJ goes into the bathroom and washes herself off in some mildly-irradiated water that has been sitting stagnant in the sink for God only knows how long.

The rest of this is just standard FoE fare: they open a safe and rummage around, there's some junk in there, they take it. Fartboy-21 is able to hack into the terminal; turns out there are some old logs and whatnot in there. BJ of course reads the logs, and Somber of course dumps their contents into the story verbatim so we can also read them. None of it seems especially relevant at present; it's mostly just bits of backstory from kkat's fic. The author is a pony named Hoss, who appears somehow connected with the Apple family. He goes over the creation of the Ministries, how Big Mac died saving Celestia from assassination, the more or less natural death of Granny Smith, and the detonation of the megaspells. For some reason, Hoss elects not to go into the Stables with everyone else, choosing instead to remain on the farm and die slowly of radiation poisoning. His typing becomes more erratic in the last couple of entries, and in true FoE spirit, he appears to have died in mid-sentence. I'm a little surprised his skeleton isn't still sitting at the keyboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlIz0q8aWpA

Page break. P-21 manages to open some kind of ammo box that was also in the room, and they stock up on bullets. While BJ loads the ammo into her saddlebag, P-21 takes a turn reading through Hoss's journal.

>As I scrolled through my inventory to distract me from the bones in the corner, P-21 read through the journal entries himself.
Ah, the corner. That's where his skeleton was hiding. I knew it was in there somewhere.

Anyway, they go outside, dig up Granny Smith's corpse, and dump Hoss's bones on top of her.

>>374330

>He returned just as my magic brushed against something more substantial. With great care, I levitated the dirt around the buried bones of the pony. Finally, I stopped. My horn hurt. My head hurt. My eyes burned. But I did feel a little better as P-21 laid old Hoss next to Granny. Then I noticed something in Granny’s hooves: a little figurine of a cheerful orange pony I recognized from the pictures. Her hooves kicked at the air above her as she grinned confidently at me.
No. No. Nonononononononono. N-O spells NO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. No. Not those goddamned butt-fucking son-of-a-dick-in-the-ass collectible statues again. No. Just...please. No.

>Carefully, I levitated the little statue from the grave and gently brushed the dirt away from a tiny plaque at the base. ‘Be Strong’. Looking at the orange pony, her little cowboy hat and three-apple cutie mark, I couldn’t help but smile. I wanted to be strong. I needed to be strong. I glanced at P-21, but he was simply placing the bones.
*sigh*
We're really doing this, aren't we?

>“Would it be okay?” I asked softly. He glanced at me, then at the figurine, before going back to placing Hoss’s remains in the earth.
>“I’m curious why you’re asking me,” he said as he finished laying out the bones. He finished by placing a brown moth-chewed hat atop the old skull.
>“Because you seem to know what’s right,” I replied. I felt so confused right now, I’d welcome any advice.
>“I guess that depends on why you want it,” he said as he sat on the edge of the grave, looking at me.
Alright, I am willing to give BJ and her dad Somber a small amount of credit here: at least she had the decency to ask before proceeding to loot Granny Smith's tomb. I mean, sure, the person horse, whatever she asked doesn't exactly have a right to grant permission here, but...at least she asked someone, instead of just grabbing the stupid thing and pocketing it without a second thought. Once again: this story so far is basically just kkat's FoE with a few minor improvements here and there.

>“Because. I want to remember him… because no one else does but us.” I looked at him and gave a snotty sniff. “And I’ve got to be strong…”
Okay, wanting to memorialize this poor nameless dead guy is a decent enough thing to do I guess, but...it seems like you could still accomplish that without swiping personal mementos from his wife's grave. Or, here's something: instead of taking the dumb statue for your autismo statue collection, why not put it upstairs somewhere in a place of prominence? Make a little memorial display out of it. Do something with one of these idiotic statues that doesn't involve a flimsy, transparent justification for grave robbery.

Or, she could go the opposite direction with it: just straight-up take the stupid thing and don't even try to justify it. Just be all like, "Fuck Granny Smith's rotting carcass, I'm taking this treasured statue of her granddaughter so I can put it on my bookshelf next to my Hatsune Miku figurines, and if you niggers don't like it you can suck my lady-balls! Yoink!" I mean, if you're going to be a kleptomaniacal autist, at least own it for Christ's sake.

Anyway, whatever; enough with the fucking statue. After a page break, BJ awakens in a strange bed; presumably they spent the night in the farmhouse. Unfortunately, she soon discovers a bunch of red blips on her EFS, and hears some familiar voices downstairs. It seems that U-21, the other male unicorn from Stable 99, was able to track BJ by her PipBuck tag. Presumably this is why the invader-raiders brought him along.

A moment later, one of them opens her door and pokes her head into BJ's room. Things go rather predictably from here:

>I pulled the trigger. Eight pellets of lead travelled less than two feet, turning the firearm into scrap and her lower face and throat into pulp. She made a noise; not exactly a scream, with all the bubbly froth coming from her. Her whole body whipped wildly, flinging gore before she collapsed in a thrashing heap.
lol

>Three rounds of buckshot turned the hall and most of her front into blasted ruin. As that accelerated time wore off, she slumped to the ground, her last shots chewing up the floor before she fell over in a bloody mess. I looked down at the mare still thrashing on the ground as she tried to breathe through the ground meat of her throat. I wanted to put her out of her misery. From the tears in her eyes, she wanted it too. I pointed the shotgun at her head; she stilled a little. Just pull the trigger. End her pain…
lol. lmao even.

Anyway, the edge goes on for a bit longer, but it's just more of the same. She does leave one of them alive as an act of...eh, we'll just call it "mercy" for now...which could become significant later on. She also fires on U-21; even though he is clearly a prisoner of the invaders, he seems to be a little too enthusiastic about helping them for BJ's taste. However, at the last moment he raises his foreleg to shield himself, and instead of killing him the shot merely destroys his PipBuck. She is about to finish the job, when P-21 suddenly shoots her in the ass. It...seems accidental? I'm not sure. I'm sort of picking up on a hostile vibe from this guy; he might actually have shot her intentionally. Maybe he doesn't want to see one of his brother fuccbois get iced.

Anyway, P-21 pleads for BJ to spare U-21, and ultimately she does, since his PipBuck is destroyed and he can no longer track her. Also at P-21's insistence, she leaves him with a couple of healing potions so he can take care of himself. Then, BJ and Dr. Fuccboi leave the farmhouse.

>>374333

Page break. BJ and Fuccboi are still heading west. Fuccboi's leg is still hurting, and for some reason he refuses the medicine BJ offers him. He also refuses to take the gun she offers him. His reasons are a bit interesting: apparently, he doesn't trust himself not to shoot her. This seems to confirm my suspicion from earlier.

>We weren’t friends.
>That was the truth of it. He was smart, clever, and resourceful, but we were not friends. Was that really so surprising? Clearly, there was far more bothering him than just his injured leg. Yet he wouldn’t talk. It’s like he hated me or something, but hadn’t I saved him from Daisy? Didn’t I help him escape from 99?
My assumption here is that P-21, while seeing the practicality of teaming up with BJ for now, also deeply resents her as both a female and a security mare for Stable 99. The males don't seem to have been particularly well-treated, so his hostility makes sense.

Anyway, they keep walking until they eventually reach the destination that Frank marked on BJ's PipBuck. It turns out to be an abandoned school building in a town called Withers. In a shocking turn of events that will surprise no one, the building turns out to be full of raiders. The decor in there is par for the course: lots of dead bodies, decapitated children, blood, feces, entrails, etc etc etc.

Events move predictably from here. Bang bang bang, splat splat splat, edge edge edge. The raiders are dead now. Unfortunately, BJ doesn't emerge from the fight unscathed. She gets a cut on the neck that her barding doesn't completely deflect, as well as a mild nick on the ear from a passing bullet. Oh yeah, she also gets like half of her skin blown off by a grenade; almost forgot about that.

Oh, also, during the fight there's a brief exchange between BJ and P-21 that seems like it might be important:

>There was a guilty look in his eyes. “I don’t trust myself with a gun right now…” He looked away. “I’m glad you know who you’re supposed to shoot. I feel like I want to shoot everypony. You know who to shoot.”
>Him shooting me in the farmhouse... and trying to fire again after I hit the safety... those had been accidents... right?
She's trying to give him a gun so he can help her mow down their enemies, but he's still reluctant to take it. At first I was thinking this refusal is because he is meant to be some kind of Velvet-Remedy-esque pacifist pussy, but I actually don't think that's it. This guy seems to be harboring quite a bit of repressed rage, and he seems to have a legitimate desire to hurt Blackjack, which he doesn't entirely trust his better angel to override. The reasons for this are still a bit murky, though.

Anyway, it looks like most of the raiders are dead at this point. They go through a couple of classrooms to make sure the area is clear. Then:

>I trotted past more scattered filth, heedless of the risk. At this moment, I just wanted it over with and cleared. The other classroom had a pen of sorts constructed of chain-link fence in the far corner. Within were a half-dozen filthy, terrified-looking fillies. The raider crouched behind them.
Oh boy, a group of helpless prisoners for the hero to rescue. That's another box checked! Are the fillies being raped and murdered? I'll bet they're being raped and murdered.

Events move predictably from here:

>My last two shots rang out, and his ribcage vanished. The assorted viscera within came slithering out in a messy heap over his hostages, but at least they were still alive. Suddenly, the girls started screaming. Then there were two bangs from behind me and an explosion and everything turned white and then dark.

Page break. BJ awakens to find the rest of the raiders dead, and the fillies eating cereal. For a brief moment, BJ believes that the shot in the back had come from P-21. However, he denies it, and the fillies confirm that it wasn't him. What actually happened is that a raider BJ had spared, I'm assuming the one from the farm earlier, had followed them or something and then shot her in the back. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

Anyway, Somber once again demonstrates that he is basically writing the exact same story as kkat, but just a tiny bit better:

>“He’s funny,” a teal filly said as she grinned at P-21. “He was actually apologizing to ‘em after they was blowed up!” One of the girls laughed. The rest had expressions ranging from pained to tired to even happy. They didn’t look scared. Though with how I must have looked right then, it’d be a miracle if anypony was scared of me.
>“As for my name, I’m Scoodle. Them raiders grabbed us while we was out lookin’ fer stuff fer the Finders.”
>Scoodle? Well… who was I to judge? “My name’s Blackjack.”
>“P-21,” he chimed in.
>“Y’all got funny names.” That seemed to count in our favor. The teal pony lifted the box of Sugar Apple Bombs and poured them into her mouth, chewing frantically before letting out a loud belch, much to the giggles of the other fillies.
Rescued NPCs with actual names and spoken dialogue? Personalities even? In my Fallout: Equestria spinoff? Apparently, it's more common than you think.

Anyway, it turns out that Scoodle and her friends are "Crusaders." They wear CMC-esque capes, but their job is to run around scavenging supplies to sell to Finders, who are apparently merchants that buy and sell scavenged junk. Their apparent level of experience at doing this accounts for their cavalier attitude towards the violence they just witnessed.

I have to say, I'm liking the amount of thought Somber puts into making this setting and its inhabitants feel real. Again: I'm finding this to be basically the same story as FoE, just done a tiny bit better. It contains a lot of the things I didn't care for about the original, but the little improvements here and there make all the difference. Reading FoE was like being raped, whereas so far, PH is like being raped by someone decent enough to put a condom on so you don't get AIDS.

>>374334

Page break. BJ decides to go exploring around Withers, to make sure there aren't any more filly-raping murderers lurking around and waiting to lob grenades at her. So far the third-degree burns she suffered don't seem to be affecting her much. She comes across a billboard advertising a place called Hoofington. I seem to recall this location being mentioned once or twice in passing; I'm assuming it will be significant later.

Suddenly, a wild sprite-bot appears. BJ flags it down and has a brief conversation with Frank.

>“Glad to be it,” I replied with a wince. I smiled as I looked at the bandages that half covered my body. “Half blown up, but yeah. Alive.”
Oh, okay. She bandaged up her third degree burns. Between that and the sugary cereal she just enjoyed, I'm sure she's right as rain now.

Anyway, she grills Frank about a hunch she has: that he sent her running straight into a nest of raiders on purpose. They go back and forth for a bit, but eventually he admits that yes, he did. However, he insists his reasons were pure:

>The spritebot hesitated, and I felt he was picking his words carefully. “I might have had some intelligence about them being held till slavers could pick them up.”

BJ demands to know why he didn't just tell her that there were a bunch of fillies being held prisoner. Again, Frank protests his noble intentions:

>“Please, don’t. Do you have any idea what it’s like to tell people six fillies are being held by raiders only to have them turn and run the opposite direction? Or, worse, kill the raiders and sell the foals to slavers themselves?” There was anguish in his voice that said he knew all too well. “I just wanted to point you in the right direction and hope it would work out.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg

Come on now, Somber. Is that the really the most tragic thing you could think up? Frank sends ponies to rescue the foals from the slavers, and sometimes they just sell them to the slavers themselves? Don't they even rape the fillies before selling them? Maybe murder a few of them? Have them fight to the death in round-robin cage matches? Fist them and use them as boxing gloves to fend off their grieving parents? Oh wait; the fillies are orphans, so that wouldn't work. Never mind; forget I even brought it up.

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.

>]Footnote: Level Up.

>New Perk: Telekinetic Precision - You’ve got a steady horn on your head for when you need to count sand, thread a needle, or keep a pin in a grenade.

The ']' character is a typo on Somber's part, not mine.

>>374335

Chapter 3: Learning Curve

As with the preceding chapters, this one starts off with some redundant information:

>Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
>By Somber
>Chapter 3: Learning Curve

As well as another unattributed mystery quote:

>“I’m so sorry…”
About what? The bad formatting? You don't need to apologize; just stop doing it.

Anyway, when the chapter opens it is the following day.

>We waited in the Withers public school till morning. Really, once the flies and the reek of rotting meat reached a certain point, all of us were glad to get out of there.
I hate to be a nag, but were there seriously no other buildings available in Withers to sleep in? I get that the town is a post-apocalyptic ruin and all, but I'd have to assume there'd be at least a few buildings that survived the explosions and have the added advantage of not being full of blood and shit and rotting carcasses. Really? There weren't? Not even a Motel 6 or anything? Never mind; forget I even brought it up.

>I still resembled a mummy with all the bandages coiled around me, but their healing magic was doing the trick. Though it’d taken two healing potions to bring me back from the gunshots to my back and the back of my head, my luck was still holding out.
My hopes for the rules of healing magic in this story turning out to be less ridiculous than its predecessor are fading faster than Biden's mental acuity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvqsC3g-QDo

Anyway, BJ & Co. are still in the classroom, surrounded by rotting corpses. BJ examines a map on the wall and discovers that Hoofington, the town whose billboard she saw in the previous chapter, is a short distance away. She also notices some old, fading propaganda posters:
>a pink pony with her mane striped almost identical to mine, but pink and gray rather than black and red, stared out with a grin above a caption that read ‘Trouble can start in the smallest places’. A purple unicorn sat on the library wall, looking clever and surrounded by floating books, saying ‘We need every idea’. Well, that’s what I thought it said. Some wit had scratched out ‘idea’ and written ‘penis’. I got the joke. In the nurse’s office, a soulful yellow pegasus hugged a bunny while telling me ‘Little ouchies are still ouchies’.

>I knew there had been a war. Even security ponies had to learn history in 99. Zebras had attacked and attempted to exterminate all of ponykind. There’d been six ministries that had done all they could to end the war and find peace for ponykind. They’d failed. It might have been unfair of me, but I hoped that they’d done more to try and end the war than just make pithy quotes for posters.
Once again, Somber manages to clearly address an issue that kkat left ambiguous.

Scoodle and the other fillies give BJ and P-21 a quick rundown on how the Wasteland works. They explain about scavenging, gun repair, and bottle caps being used as currency. Then, they set out on the road.

It's not at all clear where the group is headed or why. Again, this seems to be another instance of Somber's story imitating kkat's. The apparent destination is Hoofington. Along the way, they are attacked by some radhogs, which provides a nice segue into a discussion about ponies consuming animal flesh for sustenance a point which never really made a ton of sense to me, but since kkat is the one who made it canon, we can't really blame Somber.

>I tried to hide my disgust as I asked, “What are you doing with that, Scoodle?”
>“Huh?” She looked up with a bloody knife clenched in her jaws; I did my best not to shudder. She stuck the tip in the corpse and answered brightly, “Oh, this? Radhog is good eatin’!”
>I just turned my back and busied myself with not being nauseous or watching them finish their work. I’d stick with the Sugar Apple Bombs.
It was established in Ch 1 that you have literally spent your entire life up to this point eating recycled poop. Get off your high horse, horse.

Anyway, they keep walking. They bump into some more radhogs here and there, but mainly this scene is a giant infodump that takes the form of a conversation between BJ and Scoodle. Normally I don't care for this sort of thing, but FoE is a complicated setting with a lot of factions and terminology, and kkat was pretty stingy about providing this sort of information. I'm inclined to consider this a positive.

Here is a brief synopsis of what we learn:

Most of the Wasteland's inhabitants keep to themselves and are mostly focused on their own survival; they will generally not go out of their way to harm or hurt anyone. Other types, such as the raiders, are aggressive to the point of ridiculousness again, this was already established canon inherited from kkat, and a few that are genuinely good and helpful. Scoodle identifies the Crusaders as belonging to the chaotic-neutral group:

>“What, ya think because we’re young we’re helpless?” And with a flick of her head she scooped the pistol out of her holster and pointed it right at his head as if she had a S.A.T.S. spell herself. Then she grinned around the handle before spitting the pistol back into her holster. “We don’t fight lest we gotta. We stick together and hide when we can. We got lots of forts all around we can hole up in if we need ta,” she said as she trotted along. “See, we can get in places big ponies like yerselves can’t. We find all kinds o’ good stuff in cellars and tunnels and stuff.”
I have to say, Scoodle and her merry band of ragamuffins are beginning to grow on me. They remind me a little of the pickpocket gang from Oliver Twist. I like their mannerisms and their idiosyncratic speaking style and the way they fit into the world. They feel like a real organic part of this setting; definitely a far cry from the sad-eyed helpless orphan-foals that kkat dotted all over his world for no reason beyond giving Littlepip something to rescue. I'm kind of hoping they end up becoming major characters and not just one-offs.

>>374342

Anyway, some other information is covered as well. We learn a bit more about the "Finders" that were mentioned earlier:

>“Shoot, Finders care only about the caps. You got caps, they’re yer best buds in the world. Ya got nothing and they’ll piss on ya soon as look at ya. Finders ain’t nopony’s friends and don’t you believe ‘em when they say otherwise.” Scoodle and the other Crusaders definitely didn’t seem very happy, even though we were apparently heading towards their town.

The identity of Deus aka Cyberpony:

>I described Deus and the filly immediately looked concerned. “Well from what you said, I’m guessing he’s a Reaper.”
>“Reapers is what happens when raiders grow up. They’re the baddest of the baddest. Don’t take shit off nopony. There’s only a hundred of ‘em, cause the only way to join is ta kill another Reaper hoof to hoof. Monsters one and all,” Scoodle said darkly.

A short list of potentially helpful Wasteland residents:

>“Well there’s DJ Pon3 on the radio. He’s off in Manehattan, but he knows stuff what’s going on everywhere. You can hear him all over the place.” P-21 and I shared a look and added it to the mind bogglingly long list of ‘what the fuck are they talking about?’ “There’s also them Society ponies. I guess they technically count since they do help. Bunch of stuck up thoroughbreds that give ya a meal and then tell ya how thankful ya should be for getting it.”

>“Well, ya can talk ta the college ponies. Call themselves the coll… co… um… well most folks just call ‘em Eggheads. They’re way over past the Core, but you might run across ‘em. They wanna fix Equestria. Dunno how. They’re nice to us most often. If we ever come down with worms we always ask them fer help. They got this medicine that’ll clean ya out lickity-split!”

The Steel Rangers:

>“I didn’t forget ‘em. Wasn’t gonna mention ‘em,” she said sourly at the pink filly. “Rangers might help ya. They might not. Might shoot ya. They got their own things going on, mostly trying ta figger out how them roboponies work in the Core. I can tell ya they won’t give us a glass o’ piss.”

Something we haven't encountered yet called a Robopony:

>“That’s what they are, so don’t you laugh. Pony gadgets wandering all over the Core. Dangerous critters, too. You see a pony made of wires and lights, you best run. Can’t kill ‘em.” Scoodle frowned in thought. “There’s the ‘Clavers, if you want, but I don’t trust ‘em one bit.”

The Enclave:

>“The Enclave are pegasus ponies! They’re gonna swoop down and save us all!” Boing cried with a little cheer. A few of the other fillies also looked hopeful.
>“I’ll believe ‘em when I see the sun,” Scoodle replied sullenly. “They give me the willies.”

Ghouls:

>“Ghouls is ponies that are… well… they look dead. But they ain’t! I been to Meatlocker, and they wasn’t nothing but friendly to me.” Her certainty faded a little and she amended, “Well, some of ‘em might try and eat ya, but they ain’t no different from raiders.”

A general summary of Hoofington as a location:

>Ghouls. Enclave. Steel Rangers. Eggheads. Society. Reapers. Finders. Crusaders. I was suddenly getting a picture of Hoofington as a city with different stables all around it, each group fighting against the others for control and dominance.

Finally, a metric fuckton of probable foreshadowing:

>P-21 looked at Scoodle as he asked, “You mentioned the Core? What is that?”
>“The Core? It’s what got blowed up in the big war. I heard there was all kinds of tech and stuff being studied there. Least it was before the zebras blowed it ta smithereens.”
>“Wasn’t the zebras!” Boing jumped in. “Them ponies made something what blowed up in their faces!”
>“I heard that Princess Celestia sent the whole city to the moon right before the bombs went kablewy,” offered a gray unicorn filly.
>Another quickly shook her head. “Nuh-uh. It was a dragon. Biggest, scariest dragon of all. He breathed green fire.”
>“That’s what the bombs did, ya ninny!” Scoodle roared. I winced at their noise, wondering if this was how they had gotten caught in the first place.

Again, I'm usually not a fan of large, concentrated infodumps, but I'm inclined to consider it positive in this case simply because I suspect it will make the story much, much easier to follow, and because the dearth of such information was a major gripe of mine in the original FoE. Ghouls, for instance, I recall being a major point of confusion for me, that only wound up being clarified because of anons in the thread who knew the Fallout references.

Incidentally, I know that most of kkat's world was just a 1:1 transposition of elements from the Fallout universe, but there are some new terms in here that seem specific to PH. I think this is the first we've heard about Reapers, Roboponies, Finders, Crusaders, Society Ponies, and College Ponies (Eggheads). I'm curious if these are Fallout analogues or Somber's original creations; if anyone from the gallery knows and can answer it would be helpful.

Anyway, when all of this concludes, BJ pulls P-21 aside so they can try and figure out their next move. They don't have much in terms of goals or a destination, but they reason that Deus is probably still looking for them, that he still wants the EC-1101 file for whatever reason, and that it's not safe to return to the stable until the matter has been dealt with. They conclude that the thing to do would be to learn as much as they can about EC-1101, but since they don't have any clear leads on where they should go in order to do this, they reason they might as well just stick with the Crusaders for the time being. Still kind of a vague objective, but at least it makes sense, and is more of an objective than Littlepip had at a comparable point in her story.

>>374345

Anyway, they enter a new location, and the mood suddenly turns...somber.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWJDk1aayA

They come to a wide swath of land that is almost completely covered in skeletons. Because it just wouldn't be Fallout: Equestria without lots and lots of skeletons. The area is appropriately termed "The Boneyard." Apparently, what happened is that when the megaspells went off, a huge crowd of ponies fleeing from Hoofington and Manehattan fled their respective cities, wound up in this spot, got trapped or blocked somehow, and yada yada yada they all died. The fillies seem to either hold this place in some special reverence, and/or consider it dangerous.

>“There’s bad stuff here. Ghouls. And Tiara.” That was all she said before she bit down on the pistol again and continued walking.
"Tiara" may or may not be important later.

They continue to tiptoe through the tulips boneyard. BJ is confused that, even though there are ammo boxes, crates, abandoned wagons, and other lootables scattered all over this location, the fillies insist that these should not be touched. P-21 advises BJ to heed their advice. However, she is incensed at being ordered about by a cuck, and immediately does the exact opposite of not touching anything.

>Then I saw the creature within the heap of bones. It looked like a pony that had been cooked past well done, and now that it was exposed it began to move! It reared up and opened its maw wide, letting out a scream that no living pony could make. And then, it was answered.
Well, dang.

>Instantly, my PipBuck came alight with red bars as horrific screams raised in the air. The mounds around me shifted and from the depths emerged chunks of rotting meat clinging to pony frames. Shredded lips allowed jagged mouths to open far wider than any living pony’s could. There was nowhere to run; they stepped out onto the road in both directions.
Well, double dang. I guess the moral of the story is that when a bunch of orphans tell you to be quiet and keep your hooves to yourself whenever you cross a huge atomic mass grave, you're better off just listening to them.

Anyway, from an exclamation by Scoodle, we learn that these creatures are apparently called "heads." A fight scene begins.

>I popped S.A.T.S., but the rifle required a great deal more energy per shot than my pistol or shotgun. I carefully lined up my shot in that moment of frozen time, then released the spell. I could almost see the bullet as it spun through the air, striking the ghoul pony in the head and blasting it apart into meaty chunks. Without S.A.T.S. I had a harder time lining up the shots. What took one round to the head would require four to the chest.
I like that the author imposes some reasonable limitations on S.A.T.S., instead of just allowing the protagonist to be an instant bad-ass by using it all of the time. The combat in general in this story seems to be a little better thought-out than in FoE. Small improvements that make a difference.

>The Crusaders were holding up better than I’d anticipated. Maybe the fact we were ridiculously outnumbered and probably going to die helped them focus on putting every round in the screaming ghoul ponies’ heads. P-21, unarmed, simply kicked and shoved to try and keep the ghouls off the Crusaders.
So these things are ghouls? Are "heads" a type of ghoul, or did I misunderstand why Scoodle shouted "heads" as soon as she saw them? Maybe she just happened to win a coin toss at a portentous moment.

Also: didn't Scoodle just comment a few paragraphs ago that ghouls were mostly friendly and harmless? Not taking the opportunity to warn about the "heads" seems like an odd omission, seeing as how they were approaching a place filled with them. Since the Crusaders obviously know this place, as well as why it's not a good idea to try to loot corpses here, it seems logical that Scoodle might have mentioned the ravenous flesh-eating breed of ghoul that resides here when the subject came up. Just food for thought.

>Scoodle’s revolver blasted ghoul after ghoul, not firing till she had a head shot. She would be an amazing markspony when she grew up; a pony to be feared and respected. But as she turned to gun down one, two others pounced upon her.
Again, I'm really beginning to like Scoodle as a character. In kkat's world, child characters were usually helpless, pitiable creatures with huge sad eyes, who did little besides wander around the Wasteland waiting to be rescued by the author's ultra-badass protagonist. Here, the child character is a badass in her own right, and what's more she did it the hard way, learning to shoot on her own without relying on high-tech gizmos. The author even calls attention to the contrast between Scoodle's natural marksmanship and BJ's reliance on S.A.T.S.: while BJ, the adult who has technically had weapons training, has to wait for her targeting-assistance power to recharge before she can do anything, the younger pony picks up the slack. Small improvements that make a difference. I honestly think Scoodle is the most likable character I've yet encountered in the entire FoE universe; hopefully she won't end up getting killed or anything.

>One ghoul pony gripped Scoodle by her haunches, the other by her shoulders. With monstrous strength they each pulled their half.
>The teal filly was ripped in two before my eyes.
Well, dang.

>I fell into a moment of horror that felt like a S.A.T.S. that would never end as I saw with terrible clarity the organs and viscera pouring out over the asphalt.
The only thing worse than watching this character die is reading this sentence describing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAIshZBkLFU

>>374346

Anyway, Scoodle is now kill. F. Blackjack proceeds to go full Rambo on the ghouls as the dramatic music swells:

>“No!” I roared, rage seeming to guide my shots. Despite my tears blurring my vision, I laid down a rain of fire such that even the ghouls were momentarily beaten back. Every other bullet seemed to find skulls and vulnerable joints, though my horn ached from the effort. When the rifle clicked on an empty chamber, a telekinetic stream of bullets flowed from my bag into the magazine, and my attack continued. But there were more ghouls than I had bullets, and every second it seemed like more of the mindless monsters emerged from the bone piles.
If the ham on display in this paragraph could be harvested and used as food, this group would never need to hunt radhogs again.

BJ shoots until she has expended every last bullet she owns, and when she's finally out she proceeds to use her rifle as a club. However, it is still not enough; the tenacious little buggers just keep on coming. Then, suddenly, this happens:

>The scream from a nearby bonepile froze us all in place. A luminous green light spilled forth from a ghoul pony that at once started my PipBuck clicking. “Tiara!” the ghoul screamed, looking down at us with its baleful gaze. The presence of this glowing abomination was tempered by one saving grace: its presence made the hordes of ghouls back away momentarily. “Tiara? Is that you?”

To save time, I'll go over this next bit quickly. The interloper, the one the fillies referred to as "Tiara" earlier, is actually Silver Spoon, or what's left of her. I seem to recall there being some backstory about the fate that she and Diamond Tiara suffered during the first FoE, but I don't remember the specifics. In any event, Spoon seems to have been caught in the same atomic blast that created the rest of these ghouls, only she got some kind of ultra-concentrated dose of radiation that makes her ultra-radioactive. The Geiger-counter or whatever in BJ's PipBuck is going clickity-clackity all over the place. Her appearance is appropriately horrifying: in addition to glowing with an eerie green light, her glasses have also been shattered and fused into her eyeballs, rendering her blind, or partially blind, or something. She is also completely bonkers. Apparently, she has been wandering around this boneyard since the megaspell event, looking for her lost friend Diamond Tiara. She doesn't seem to know what year it is.

Thinking quickly, BJ pretends to be Diamond Tiara, and fakes her way through the whole "bump bump sugar lump rump" routine. Spoon seems to fall for her little ruse. While the ghouls strip the flesh from Scoodle's bones, Spoon and "Tiara" have a bit of light conversation, catch up on old times, and then BJ asks Spoon if she could please ask the other ghouls to stand down. She does, and they do, and the party moves on, albeit one filly lighter. The scene ends in a page break.

Wew lad. That was...something.

Believe it or not, I actually think the author handled this more or less well. The scene itself was bizarre for a number of reasons, but from a top-level view this is basically the right way to do tragedy. Not so much because of all the edgelord stuff about ripping flesh and viscera everywhere, or BJ's over-the-top dramatic reaction; that stuff was pretty much par for the course in FoE. However, the setup and execution for Scoodle's death was handled impressively, and had the intended effect.

If you really want to kick your reader in the feels as hard as possible, the basic formula is simple. Create a likable character, spend some time endearing them to the reader, and then kill them unexpectedly. If done well, it works every time. One of the works I like to recommend whenever I have a chance is the Higurashi When They Cry series of visual novels, written by Ryukishi07 the anime is more well-known, and is decent for what it is, but it's a sub-par adaptation of the story; if you want the full effect you should really play the novels. I don't think I have ever encountered a writer who was that skilled at creating likable characters and then killing them off.

The nice thing about this technique is that it usually still works even if the reader can see it coming. I've been harboring a suspicion for awhile now that Scoodle and her friends might not be long for this world; however, I will say that I wasn't expecting it to happen this quickly. Nevertheless, I was genuinely sad to see her go, and that's ultimately the effect you want your writing to have. If a character dies, the reader should miss them.

Consider the death of SteelHooves in FoE. This was a major character who is present for a good 2/3 of the story. He was given a tragic backstory and everything. However, I honestly gave zero fucks when he was suddenly and unexpectedly decapitated. By comparison, Scoodle was only in PH for a few brief scenes. How is it that her death had so much more of an emotional punch?

Well, to be fair, part of it is probably that by the time SteelHooves died, I thoroughly hated almost every single character in FoE; for me, the real tragedy was less that SteelHooves died and more that the other four main characters didn't. However, it's still worth taking a closer look a few simple things that Somber did to make Scoodle's untimely demise significant.

>>374347
Well damn, I neglect checking the catalog for a few days and suddenly there's over a dozen posts to read. A welcome surprise.

Anyway, rip (heh) in peace Scoodle. So far Somber seems to have crafted a much more enjoyable story, hampered as it is by being tied to kkat's original. The character interactions, especially the ones between BJ and P-21, are much better compared to what I can recall from the original. We're still early in the story though, and Somber has ample opportunity to fuck it all up, but I remain cautiously optimistic that this will at least be slightly better than FoE. Whatever the outcome your review will be entertaining and informative to read as always.

>>374345
>I think this is the first we've heard about Reapers, Roboponies, Finders, Crusaders, Society Ponies, and College Ponies (Eggheads). I'm curious if these are Fallout analogues or Somber's original creations; if anyone from the gallery knows and can answer it would be helpful.

To my knowledge this stuff is mostly 'original'. They're basic and tropey for such a setting, but I don't really know of any analogues to these factions in the Fallout series. The closest I think we get is the White Glove Society in Fallout: New Vegas since theyre a bunch of posh high-class folks but they are smaller-scale and used to be cannibals as their dark 'secret', and I don't remember what this fic's 'Society' is supposed to be like.

>>374346
This makes me wonder about how pip-buck enemy detection works. Feral Ghouls are mindless to the point of having all inhibitions overwritten with a senseless killing intent. They would always be marked as red, since they would never not be friendly or neutral, but them being asleep, or sitting in some kind of stasis, means they're not even marked at ALL, not even as 'passive' entitites? How far does this extend? If you walk into the middle of an ambush of ponies fully intending to murder you, but they all put their minds to something else, they show up as friendly? Don't even show up at all? Seems dumb, odd, and unclear.

>>374347

First and most obvious is that the character is genuinely likeable. Scoodle is sympathetic for much the same reason Scootaloo is sympathetic I'm assuming the similarity in names is intentional for precisely this reason. She's a scrappy little orphan with a give-em-hell attitude; you admire her spirit and want to see her succeed. Her speech affectations are also weirdly endearing. Accents can be hard to do: you basically want to write the character's dialogue in a way that's distinctive enough to be memorable, but isn't so exaggerated that it gets annoying. I'm not quite sure what I'd call the dialect used by Scoodle and the other fillies, but...it works. It's sort of a combination of the Apple family's country drawl and a gruff city accent. It's not hard to imagine street urchins in the Wasteland speaking this way.

Second, and slightly related to my first observation, is that these fillies are written in a way that makes them feel like they are genuine residents of this world, as opposed to NPCs that wander around aimlessly until the player approaches them and presses X. One of the most striking things about Somber's Wasteland vs. kkat's so far is that Somber's feels like a real place. Things happen on their own out here; it isn't just a static video game world where everything sits in a holding pattern until the protagonist takes an action.

The fillies call themselves Crusaders, and eke out a meager existence by rummaging through the ruins looking for junk they can sell to the Finders. The Finders do more or less the same thing, buying and selling whatever they can, while allowing the orphans to do the more dangerous work of actually exploring dangerous areas and retrieving items. The Finders and the Crusaders probably attempt to cheat each other through barter when possible. The relationship is mutually symbiotic and mutually exploitative, and probably just one example of hundreds of similar relationships that exist in this setting.

This version of the Wasteland is neither a functioning society nor a grimdark anarchic hellscape; it's an ecosystem, where the inhabitants do what they need to do to survive in whatever niche they can carve out. Sometimes they help each other, sometimes they fuck each other over, most of the time it's probably somewhere in between. There are bad things out there too, of course, raiders and monsters and ghouls and whatever the fuck else. However, the vast majority of the world's inhabitants are neither overly good nor overly evil; they just want to live the best lives they can, and to that end they just do what they need to do. Contrast this against kkat's setting, where cartoonishly evil raiders endlessly victimize helpless NPCs for 200 years, until one day the the hero wanders in and rescues them.

Lastly, consider the way that Blackjack fits into the equation. So far, one of the most defining traits of her character is a deep sense of inadequacy. She has the role of a security mare, but she's not especially good at it, and may not be cut out for that sort of work in the first place. She's driven by a vague sense of duty that seems to be mostly instilled in her through upbringing, yet she always seems to be either fucking something up or letting someone down. She saves P-21 from being killed or castrated or whatever, but she has to beat up one of her fellow security mares to do it. This action probably costs her the closest thing she has to a friend, as well as whatever trust and status she might have inside the Stable. She prevents the invaders from taking the EC-1101 file though I'm still not sure how exactly; either Somber doesn't understand how digital file copying works, or I am grossly misunderstanding how PipBucks and Maneframes are supposed to work, yet she has no way of knowing whether her actions ultimately saved anyone, and on top of that she is now stuck in the Wasteland with a murderous cyborg chasing her. Finally, she meets these three fillies and rescues them, only to end up getting one of them killed as a result of her ignorance and carelessness.

Again, we can make a comparison to kkat's FoE. Littlepip begins the story as a dull, essentially lifeless NPC who has no defining character traits beyond boredom and a desire to lick carpet. After leaving the Stable for no good reason and wandering purposelessly around the Wasteland for a bit, she suddenly decides she wants to save the world, and then does. One of my most frequent gripes about her was that she never had any clear motivations for doing any of what she did. She seems to be driven by some kind of squishy-yet-utterly-intractable moral code, but it's never made clear what she believes in or how she came to believe it. In the end, all we really have is this obnoxious little dwarf who goes from town to town wreaking absolute havoc and destroying everything she touches, while everyone praises her and calls her the Lightbringer. Her morality comes across as narcissism, her sense of duty comes across as megalomania, and her heroism comes across as psychopathy.

BJ is a sympathetic character so far at least; it's still early because she has real strengths and real flaws. She seems to have a genuine desire to do good and be good, but she's not sure how to go about doing that, and as a result keeps fucking things up. Her fuck-ups actually cause real damage: Scoodle is dead because of her, and she has to live with that. I suspect hope this event will be a major part of BJ's character arc.

Scoodle was only in the story for a short time, but she was rendered as a genuinely likable character, and her death had symbolic import. SteelHooves, for all his 1200 pages of tragic backstory, made few meaningful contributions, was not especially endearing, and his death served no purpose beyond a hamhanded attempt to milk the reader for sads.

This is the difference between tragedy done well, and tragedy becoming accidental comedy.

>>374692

Anyway, moving on. After the page break, the party sallies forth. We are told that it takes them an hour and a half to cross the remainder of the Boneyard, and presumably they have no further ghoul encounters. As an added kick in the teats, BJ is now suffering from acute radiation poisoning from her encounter with Silver Spoon.

>I felt like crap. I deserved to feel like crap. My guts gurgled and every square inch of my body felt like it’d been beaten. The Crusaders didn’t say a single word. They didn’t look at me or each other, but I could almost hear their thoughts in the back of my mind saying over and over again ‘She killed Scoodle for a box of bullets.’
Seeing as how I just spent two entire posts praising the things Somber did right vis a vis the whole "Scoodle gets eaten alive by ghouls" thing, I should also point out that there are some glaring logic issues with how the event was set up.

While Scoodle's death was tragic and easily preventable, Blackjack isn't entirely to blame for it. Blackjack and P-21 are both greenhorns: they've spent their entire lives living in a Stable, and have no idea how things work in the Wasteland. It's plainly established that the Crusaders understand this: we just digested a massive infodump in which the Crusaders explain Wasteland life to the two of them.

The Crusaders, Scoodle in particular, go into extensive detail about the various dos and don'ts of living in the Wasteland. She even helpfully informs them that the bottle caps they found are currency and not garbage; she didn't need to do this and the Crusaders could have profited from the omission. She tells them anyway, because Scoodle is clearly a good filly who deserves headpats and also to not have her flesh and organs torn forcibly from her skeleton. She is both astute enough to grasp that much of what she considers common knowledge is going to be new to Blackjack, and helpful enough to provide this information without needing to be prodded.

It therefore makes very little sense that, upon entering the extremely dangerous Boneyard area, a situation where explaining any and all danger to the newfags would be in everyone's interest including her own, this is all the warning she provides:

>“There’s bad stuff here. Ghouls. And Tiara.” That was all she said before she bit down on the pistol again and continued walking.
'Bad stuff' is pretty vague, and she offers no explanation whatsoever as to who 'Tiara' might be. And as I've already pointed out, earlier in the text she heavily downplays the danger of ghouls:

>Scoodle caught my look. She sighed and rolled her eyes, explaining to the clueless stable ponies, “Ghouls is ponies that are… well… they look dead. But they ain’t! I been to Meatlocker, and they wasn’t nothing but friendly to me.”
Nothing but friendly, eh? Well, that doesn't sound like anything worth getting all hot and bothered over.

To be fair, she does add this:

>Her certainty faded a little and she amended, “Well, some of ‘em might try and eat ya, but they ain’t no different from raiders.”
Some of them might try to eat me, eh? Well, that sounds like something I'd just as soon avoid. Say, we wouldn't happen to be in walking distance of an area where literally thousands of cannibal ghouls are hiding deceptively under the bones, just waiting for unwary passersby to disturb them, would we? No, I can't imagine we are, because if we were, you'd probably say something...right?

Here's the crux of the biscuit: Scoodle and the Crusdaders know the Wasteland and understand its dangers. Blackjack and P-21 don't. Wherever they are ultimately headed I'm actually still not clear on their present destination, the Crusaders know that their path will take them through the Boneyard. They know that the Boneyard is home to thousands upon thousands of carnivorous ghouls. They know that the literal only way to safely move through the Boneyard is to keep quiet and not touch anything.

Wouldn't it stand to reason that, if you are a seasoned Wastelander planning to ferry a couple of level 1 noobs through what is probably the most dangerous part of the local area, you'd want to thoroughly explain any and all dangers before even setting hoof there? If you're going to spend half the morning yakking about Finders and College Ponies and a thousand other general subjects, wouldn't it make sense to also cover some stuff that's going to be relevant in literally like 20 goddamn minutes?

Apparently not, because not only do the Crusaders fail to give BJ and P-21 any heads-up before entering the Boneyard, they suddenly and conveniently start answering all questions with vague and mysterious non-answers that utterly fail to convey the gravity of the situation:

>“We should take some of this,” I whispered as we passed a tipped-over wagon half buried by bones. I couldn’t see a single target on the E.F.S. aside from the eight of us.
>Scoodle looked at me with an expression of horror and outrage, shaking her head.

P-21, who seems to at least sense that the danger might be more serious than it appears, is equally unhelpful:

>“I think you should listen to her,” P-21 murmured.

So, unsurprisingly, the result of this is that Blackjack does something clueless and stupid, and the scene ends in tragedy. Scoodle's death was unnecessary and preventable, but she is as much to blame as Blackjack for how things turned out. In fact, you know what? The more I think about it, fuck Scoodle. I take back everything good I said about her; she sucks now. nah I'm just playin' Scoodle, you know I love you. *headpats corpse*

Anyway, the takeaway is this: as this is probably the best-executed tragic death I've yet encountered in the FoE universe, I'm inclined to give Somber quite a bit of leeway here. However, the setup could use some work. You can't just have an otherwise-sensible character suddenly holding the idiot ball just because you need her to die tragically at a specific moment.

>>374697

Anyway, fuck. They keep walking and make it out of the Boneyard. At this point, BJ, who is still dying of radiation poisoning, turns around to say something to the Crusaders, only to discover that apparently they ditched her awhile ago. P-21 is still hanging around, however.

He points out that there is a house up ahead where they can rest and treat BJ's crippling radiation sickness. However, BJ is still down in the dumps about accidentally getting a child gruesomely killed earlier that day. So, she spouts some moody bullshit about how she just wants to be left alone to die. P-21 gives her this nice little rousing speech:

>“I’m sorry, did you say something?” P-21 walked in front of me, his sure blue eyes bearing down into mine. “Sometimes we don’t get what we want,” he said as he nudged me towards a single story house beside the road. “Sometimes we don’t get to sit around and have pity parties for our mistakes. Sometimes we just have to keep going because, otherwise, we might as well just die.”
Ah, I see that Somber also shelled out the 60 bucks for "Michael Bay's Complete Guide to Writing Hokey Inspirational Lines for Side Characters to Deliver to Main Characters When Said Main Character Wants to Just Give Up and Die." Excellent; it's a fine book.

BJ, however, is unimpressed. She replies that "just dying" as opposed to "keeping going" was kind of at the center of the whole point she was trying to make just then. P-21 suddenly bitch-slaps the bejeezus out of her:

>He hit me hard enough to knock me on my side. I stared up into the sky and felt my guts churn and my pupils contract. “I’m sorry. Were you about to say you wanted to die? Is that it?” he said as he glared down at me. “If you were this weak, you should have just given yourself to Deus and been done with it.”
Did this guy suddenly grow a pair of testicles in the last hour and a half? Because from what we've seen, this is completely out of character for him.

It goes on:

>“I killed Scoodle!” I yelled up at him. It felt like a confession.
I hate to be that guy, but technically a ghoul killed Scoodle. All BJ did was set in motion a series of events that led to this outcome.

>“Yeah! You did, you fucking idiot!” he screamed back down at me. “Didn’t I tell you to listen to her? Didn’t you say to me that I know what’s right when it comes to this sort of thing? But she’s dead, Blackjack, and unless you wallowing in pity or dying will somehow magically bring her back to life then this is accomplishing nothing except indulging in your own selfish wishes!”
I once again hate to be that guy, but I can't help but point out that if P-21 had been a little more insistent on this point, this adventure might have ended differently. Seriously, where were his cajones back when it might have actually made a difference? I also should point out that Scoodle herself could have been a lot clearer on why she wanted BJ not to touch anything. All in all, I'd say this whole incident was a learning experience for just about everypony involved.

Oh, and as long as I'm being that guy, there is one more thing:

>Didn’t you say to me that I know what’s right when it comes to this sort of thing?
P-21 is conflating two separate meanings of "right" here. When BJ made this statement in its original context, she meant that P-21 seemed like someone who understands what is morally right, as in knowing right from wrong. In this context, P-21 is referring more to his understanding of what choice is correct. Whether or not BJ should have listened to Scoodle earlier is a practical choice, not a moral one.

>I slowly opened my eyes, looking into his. He hated me. I hated me.
Well, the important thing is that the two of you have finally found some common ground.

Anyway, fuck. P-21 makes BJ promise not to get any more children killed as a result of gross negligence, and BJ agrees. The scene ends in a page break.

>P-21 managed to get me into the derelict house after I’d shat myself but before I collapsed. Lying on my side on a filthy mattress, I felt like I was rotting from the inside out. That wasn’t completely inaccurate, as the next time my bowels moved it was to dump blood over my hind legs. I drifted between guilt-ridden consciousness and blissful unconsciousness.
Thank you for this level of detail, Somber, I'm sure we all appreciate it.

And there's just so much more to go:

>The worst was when I was stuck between the two. I saw Deus laughing at me as he sawed off my PipBuck with a chainsaw penis. The Overmare reminded me that I was ultimately disposable. The little orange pony figurine told me that she could only help so much; I’d have to get up and be strong on my own. I felt eyeglasses melting on my face and covering my cheeks in cracked glass. Scoodle’s severed head lay on the bed next to me and whispered softly over and over again, "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!"
Alright, I admit I added that Ovaltine bit.

Anyway, fuck. The long and short of it is that BJ lies in bed being edgy for an indeterminate time, while P-21 nurses her back to health. No mention is made of how exactly this is accomplished. This seems like an odd omission, seeing as how radiation sickness isn't something that just goes away on its own with bed rest and chicken soup. Perhaps Somber got too carried away writing about Blackjack's horrible diarrhea, and neglected to mention the existence of a product called Rad-Away, which readers of the previous fic would know about, but which has not yet been introduced in this one.

Suddenly, Frank shows up:

>Carefully I pushed myself up and covered my face with my hooves. “I fucked up, Watcher.”
>“You’re not the first. And if I can be blunt, your fuck up only killed one filly. I’ve known ponies whose fuck ups killed millions. So on the grand scale of fuck ups, I think you’re overrating yourself.”
Wait, was he just floating around all this time, watching Scoodle get torn to shreds without doing anything? What a dick.

>>374348
>We're still early in the story though, and Somber has ample opportunity to fuck it all up, but I remain cautiously optimistic that this will at least be slightly better than FoE
This is pretty much my view of it atm. If nothing else, compared to its predecessor it has nowhere to go but up. famous last words

>>374350
I was actually wondering about this too. From what I can tell, the EFS works by somehow reading the intent of a pony/creature relative to the PipBuck wearer and displaying them as friendly, neutral or hostile. This is actually one of the few areas where having a technology be "magic" instead of electronic actually makes things less complicated. But anyway yes, it seems odd that the ghouls wouldn't be detected at all. My understanding of what happened is that they weren't unconscious or asleep, they were just unaware that the ponies were passing through the area. Sort like how in zombie movies the zombies just sort of wander around aimlessly or stand there until something catches their attention. Seems reasonable that the PipBuck would at the very least have detected their presence, and I agree that it most likely would mark them hostile by default.

The more I think about it the whole event feels a little contrived. Everything I like about Scoodle's character is still valid, as is the significance of having her die as a result of Blackjack's mistake. However, the actual situation the author cooked up that leads to her death leaves a lot to be desired. My guess is the author just had an idea for a creepy scene, but didn't completely think it through.

>>374699

>Slowly I dropped my hooves from my face to look at the little machine as it went on. “So I’m asking you: is this it? Are you just a pony that wallows in self-pity and kicks herself for a mistake, or not? Because if this is it, then I’ll leave you be. I can’t help you. You can’t help anypony.”
Wow, that Michael Bay book was more popular than I realized.

Anyway, Frank continues to give BJ a pep talk, and slowly she begins to come around.

>It would be so easy just to give up. Fold the hand. Cash in the chips. Quitters might not go bust, but they’d also never make it big.
Ah, good. I see that Somber spent the extra fiver to get the bonus "Michael Bay's Book of Inspirational Gambling Cliches" PDF. An amazingly useful reference guide; I use it myself constantly. I mean, sometimes in life, you'll find that the chips are down. And even though you might throw snake eyes, sometimes you just have to go all in and bet everything you have on seven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbHcIKG1Xjg

Aaaaanyway, Frank finishes up his pep talk, BJ decides to keep on keepin' on, and the scene ends in a page break.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akec_5zCgso

>Turns out, starting involved me getting off that filthy bed and finding some RadAway before I either died outright or grew a second head.
Ah, there's our first mention of RadAway.

Frank knows of a place where she can find RadAway: a downed Ministry of Something-or-Other carriage that crashed 200 years ago, and was never looted because blah blah blah monsters; pretty standard FoE fare. Also in keeping with the FoE blueprint, I'm assuming the fact that BJ is presently rotting out from the inside due to acute radiation poisoning, which would only have gotten worse during the couple of days she wasted lying around moping, will in no way shape or form affect her ability to take out the bad guys.

>“Those are some nasty looking reptiles,” I muttered as I looked down at the lake surrounded by dead trees and gangly weeds. A small island on a cove was connected to the mainland by a rotten bridge. I could barely make out the sight of the upside down sky carriage mixed in with the remains of a gazebo. P-21 and I were crouched in the flattened remains of a small cottage a small ways above the gray waters of the small lake. ‘Lake Macintosh’ appeared on my PipBuck map.
*sigh*
Alright, let's get this over with.

BJ and P-21 spend a few minutes having a token argument over whether or not it's suicidally stupid for BJ to participate in the assault in her condition. It plays out exactly the way you would expect. Then, the fight proper begins.

Once again to Somber's credit, he proves just slightly more capable than kkat at doing kkat's schtick. There are three giant reptiles on the island according to her EFS, though BJ decides to err on the side of caution and assume there could be more. She fires at one of them to attract it, then kills it off. The other two are drawn by the noise and begin charging her as well.

She apparently has a shotgun and some type of rifle, and a very limited quantity of ammo like the first story, I am already finding it next to impossible to keep track of exactly which guns and how much of each type of ammo everyone is supposed to be carrying; I thought they picked up a ton of ammunition a few scenes ago but I could be mistaken. She expends everything she has for the rifle taking down the first gator, and the shotgun on the second. There is still one gator left, but she has no more bullets. Oh noes, whatever will she do?

>This would normally be the point where I would die and P-21 would take over and probably do the Wasteland a lot more good. There was just one catch: I wasn’t done paying for a little teal pony.
It's not the principal that kills you, it's the interest.

Anyway, much like Littlepip, she decides to creatively improvise. However, unlike Littlepip, her improvisations are so far a little more practical and don't involve as much blatant magical physics-rape. When the gator opens its mouth to eat her, she jams the empty shotgun in between its jaws to prop them open. Then, she tosses a grenade down its throat. It kerplodes. All in all, a concise, reasonably-executed fight: action was clearly described, and there was never any ambiguity about positions or number of combatants.

At this point, P-21 rejoins her. They immediately dive into an inappropriate side conversation.

>He rolled his eyes and gave a long sigh. “I’m back in the stable again.” I detected more than a little bitterness in that comment.
Yeah, but at least now you're no longer well-fed, sheltered from the elements and from enemies, and constantly getting laid. You have to look on the bright side, my dude.

>He rounded on me, teeth bared as he glared with undisguised anger. “My whole life, I’ve had mares telling me what I can and can’t do. I wasn’t even allowed the option of turning a mare down if she was on my breeding rotation.” He gave a little snort. “Did you know some males in 99 would cut or beat themselves just to get a break? Just to do something we wanted instead of what we were instructed to do?”
Aaaand those newly-developed testicles of his just went and crawled right back up his butt, never to be seen again.

Anyway, he keeps on blubbering for a few more paragraphs about how unfair and miserable life in the Stable was. BJ asks if this conversation can at least wait until she pops her RadAway, so she can give his emo-whining her full attention and not have to worry about shitting out her entire rotted digestive tract, but P-21 is having none of it. He wants to talk about this now.

He demands to know what, if anything, BJ would have done with her life had she not been conscripted into her role as a security mare. BJ is forced to admit that, since she had no real goals or ambitions anyway, life as a security mare probably wasn't all that bad. Probably a fair sight better than "designated toilet scrubber" or "pre-op groin shaver," at least.

>>374779

It is at this point that we learn the source of P-21's eternally sour attitude: it turns out that he always wanted to be a teacher, but Stable rules had forced him to become a cabana-boy instead.

>“Before I was P-1 I tried to learn all I could about arcane sciences. That was how I knew Duct Tape so well; I studied off her as she went through training. I thought that if I knew enough that maybe the Overmare would let me teach. I would have been fine doing both jobs.” He opened up the crate and took out two empty syringes and two boxes of some kind of canned meat. “Know what the Overmare said? She said she’d let me teach sex education in my breeding rotation.”
Well, that would still be a fair sight better than letting the pre-op groin shaver teach sex education.

Anyway, while this is interesting enough as a chunk of P-21's backstory, this is hardly an appropriate time for them to be talking about it. Plus, it's been well established that the career-chip-based job system of Stable 99 was pretty fucked; at this point they are just whipping a dead emo cabana-boy horse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13oK9HMEtv8

To cut a long story short, P-21 gets the box open, BJ drinks the RadAway, and her radiation sickness is cured, or lessened, or something. We are told that her meter is in the yellow now, whatever that means. I guess the takeaway is that she is less radioactive than before, but still a little radioactive. Anyway, the conversation wraps itself up, and they reach an understanding. Here are the main bullet points:

>BJ observes that, based on his interactions with the Crusaders, P-21 is good with kids and would have probably made a good teacher
>P-21 acknowledges that, even though she is reckless and impulsive and kind of an idiot, BJ is also brave and resourceful, and actually did save his life at one point, so there's that
>while the two of them are still not actually friends, due to recent events they are less not-friends than they were before

Also, BJ finds a strange glowing sphere and decides to take it with her. Her PipBuck informs her that it's called a "Memory Orb." Oh, goody; more of those things. I can't wait to see what's inside it.

End of chapter.

>Footnote: Level Up.
>Skill Note: Guns (50)
>New Perk: Run and Gun - Better accuracy with ranged weapons while moving.
>Quest Perk: Minor Mutation: Rad Sight - When under the effects of minor radiation poisoning, gain +1 Perception in low light conditions. -15 to sneak, speech when not wearing sunglasses, authority glasses, or mirrored sunglasses.
As with the first story, I have no idea if I'm supposed to take these "level up" comments literally, or just read them as tongue-in-cheek references to the video game origins of this story.

>>374781

Chapter 4: Innocence

>Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
>By Somber
>Chapter 4: Innocence
Ah, we're still reading the same book by the same author. Good. I remember one time, I was reading Treasure Island and suddenly it turned into Bonfire of the Vanities. I was confused as all hell. Announcing the title and author at the beginning of every single chapter could have helped me avoid this confusion. t. nobody, ever.

>“Another donut! Extra sprinkles!”
The author's bad formatting makes this chapter's unattributed mystery quote even less comprehensible than usual. Normally, the italics make it clear enough that the first line of every chapter is meant to be read as an epigraph. But, in this case, the opening paragraph of the chapter is a quote from the Overmare's log on BJ's PipBuck, and is thus also italicized. Thus, the way this text reads, it seems that the chapter opens with a random person saying "Another donut! Extra sprinkles!", followed by a non-sequitur transcription of an old audio log. Had Somber at least adopted the convention of centering his epigraphs the way kkat did, this minor yet somehow extremely irritating issue could have been resolved.

Anyway, fuck. As I said, the chapter opens with one of the logs that P-21 copied onto her PipBuck before she escaped. It's basically just the Overfilly ranting to herself about how she rules with terror and oppression from the shadows, because everypony plots against her. Here's the full thing if you want to read it:

>Stable Overmare’s log 11-#231: There is a threat to my stable and my ponies. A threat within that must be dealt with. Numerous problems plague the stable, and I am certain of the cause: her name is Rivets. When I assumed the Overmare position, as per my right, she resisted me from the very beginning. Patronizing. Insulting. Countermanding and fighting me at every turn. I am the Overmare! Stable-Tec created my position, gave ME authority, but she believes the stable is hers. Worse, she has a significant following among the security ponies. The head of security herself dared countermand my arrest order! Oh, she claimed there was no law, but I am the law! Something will have to be done about the nag. I won’t let her do it to me again.

In other exciting news, P-21 is once again in a pissy mood. On top of that, it's also raining. So, BJ is listening to the log files as they walk. I still have no idea where they're headed exactly, but we'll put a pin in that for now.

>Stable Overmare’s log 11-#233: If help cannot be found within the stable, then it must be found without. To do that, I’ll need to make contact with the outside, and I think I’ve found a pony to help me with that. Duct Tape from the night shift. She’s quiet, well trained, and obedient. Above all, she’s lonely and naïve. I just need to find the correct leverage to use against her. Perhaps her foal? Or maybe I won’t even need that; I had her move some stable broadcast equipment to Maintenance One, and she did so without question or speculation. Best of all, it infuriated Rivets.

These logs seem to mostly be filling in a few of the gaps in our knowledge of how the Stable fell. The Overfilly, paranoid that Rivets might be trying to overthrow her, decided to contact StableTec headquarters and have them send backup. She enlisted Duct Tape to do the grunt work of unsealing the door, through some combination of bribery and coercion. It seems that P-21, then called P-20, factored into this: he and Duct Tape seem to have had a deeper relationship than was typical between breeder and breedee. The Overfilly took advantage of this, promising Duct Tape unrestricted access to her favorite cabana boy in return for doing her evil bidding. Yada yada yada, it worked; DT unsealed the door. With access to the outside world no longer a problem, the Overfilly needed a way to establish contact with StableTec HQ. She selected an unidentified male to send on this errand. This turns out to be U-21, the guy who was helping the invaders earlier.

The author did a reasonably good job thinking all of this out. The Overfilly's line of reasoning makes sense: she has no idea what's been going on in the outside world for the last two centuries, but probably has access to whatever spotty historical records were loaded into the maneframes, plus whatever procedural manuals StableTec would have provided. She assumes that StableTec still exists somewhere, and will provide support if she requests it. Seeing as how she is also a naive, spoiled child with an overinflated sense of her own power, she interprets any criticism of her leadership, however warranted, as rebellion, and thus becomes suspicious of Rivets and Gin Rummy. Believing that there is a plot brewing against her, she cooks up a super-sekrit plan to send word to StableTec that she can't trust her own security team, and that she needs them to send reinforcements.

However:

>Stable Overmare’s log 11-#240: Success! U-21 made contact with Stable-Tec almost immediately. He has put me in touch with Stable-Tec’s director Sanguine… a male, apparently. He verified his position by accurately identifying several Stable-Tec passwords from when the stable was first sealed. He was quite sympathetic to my needs and assured me that, once the stable was back in my hooves, Stable-Tec had no interest in interfering. His only price for assistance was a file in my databases. I suspect deception, but I have no alternatives. I will put Duct Tape on extracting this file.

Whether or not U-21 ever seriously tried to find StableTec HQ is unknown; most probably he just decided to run for it, when he was intercepted at some point by Deus's group. For reasons unknown, this group wanted the EC-1101 file from Stable 99. So, using U-21 as a go-between, they pretend to be StableTec representatives and agree to "help" the Overfilly. U-21 probably betrayed the Stable willingly enough, since he would have been in a similar position to P-21.

>>374783

Anyway, this goes on for a while. The Overfilly employed U-21 into arranging a deal with this Sanguine character, whose true identity is yet unknown. She also promised Duct Tape that when it was all over, she and P-21 would be free to pursue their own life together on the surface. However, Duct Tape seems to have suspected that the Overfilly might not keep her word, so she encrypted the EC-1101 file and refused to give up the password until the Overfilly held up her end of the deal.

Unfortunately, this seems to have backfired on her. The Overfilly, angry at being defied, apparently decided it would be easier to just have Duct Tape killed and then have her own underlings work on breaking the encryption. This is actually a mind-numbingly stupid decision, since all DT wanted was to leave the stable, and the OF didn't technically need her anymore after the door was unsealed. The sensible course of action would have just been to do what she said she would do in the first place: let DT and P-21 go, in exchange for the password. However, it's well established that the Overfilly hates being defied and is bat-shit crazy anyway, so this is all pretty much in character for her.

So, she booby-traps a terminal and has DT needlessly killed. At this point, she has roughly 24 hours to break the encryption before Deus and his team show up to collect the file. However, since it turns out that Deus is going to betray her anyway, she inadvertently flips him the bird on her way out by ensuring that all he will gain for his troubles is a file that he can't open. In any event, the whole plan goes to pot when Blackjack ends up taking the file and running out the door with it, and...we all know the rest. I think.

However:

>The next few recordings became more and more hysterical. Screaming, crying, and desperate rants. Half of them involved the Overmare begging somepony not to hurt her. The other half about how killing ‘her’ was the only thing she could do.
Logically, you would assume that these were her last recordings, made during the Stable invasion, and the "somepony" whose mercy the Overfilly is begging for would be Deus. However, this is not the case; the timeline for these appears to roughly the period before BJ went to play cards with Rivets and the maintenance ponies during Ch 1.

This timeline is confirmed by the last message in the log:

>My log… it’s time. Sanguine can worry about the encryption himself. Blackjack is meeting with Rivets as I record this; I have no doubt that the coup is imminent. Deus has several dozen ponies ready, and now I must take back what is mine. If I don’t act now, then I’m certain that tomorrow I’ll not have a stable. I will not be the final Overmare of Stable 99. This is my stable. And nopony shall ever hurt me here again. Not her. Not anypony.
Whoever is "hurting" the OF in the previous recordings, they don't seem to fear her authority, which suggests an outsider. However, this was clearly recorded prior to Deus's invasion of the Stable.

BJ is also perplexed by this:

>“Hurt her? Who hurt the Overmare? She’s the Overmare! No pony could ever touch her!” I sighed and shook my head. P-21 walked pensively beside me, hanging his head a little.
This seems to confirm my suspicion that there is one more piece to this puzzle, which the author is deliberately leaving out for now.

Oh, this is from earlier, but there's one more thing in this section that bears mention:

>I watched him, his odd mask-like expression. What was he thinking? “Did you... like her?”
>He glanced at me with a cool look. “She liked me. That was all that mattered.”
>“That’s not what I meant. I mean...” Goddesses, could I slog through an awkward conversation or what?
>He looked at me and sighed. “She helped me. That’s something only one other mare’s done. So I’m thankful for that and sorry she died, but no. I didn’t like her. Not like you’re asking.”
From what we've seen, it's obvious that Duct Tape was in love with P-21. He is probably also the father of Scotch Tape. DT likely expected, or at least hoped, that the two of them possibly three; it's not clear if she planned on taking her filly along or was just planning to abandon her would be able to escape the Stable and pursue some kind of relationship on the surface. However, in the above exchange, we learn that P-21 did not feel the same way. From what I can tell, his plan was to dump her and go off on his own the second the two of them made it to the surface. This whole thing is turning into a regular soap opera.

Anyway, the takeaway from all this seems to be that Sanguine, the mystery player, is at the center of the drama. It's easiest to just let P-21 explain:

>“First, that this ‘Sanguine’ was probably watching the stable before U-21 left it. You know how dangerous this place is. A lone stable unicorn wouldn’t have lasted long. Second, Sanguine has some links to Stable-Tec; the Overmare confirmed that with his codes. Third, he clearly had a grasp of the Overmare’s psychology. I suspect we’re looking for somepony who’s spent time in a stable themselves. Fourth, he’s got established contacts with Reapers and raiders. Deus might have been brutal, but he also showed restraint rather than charging through and killing everything.”
So, gang, it looks like we have a mystery on our hands. Hooves. Whatever.

BJ sees the situation as less complicated, however:

>“So we find and kill Sanguine and we win? Sweet. I love a simple plan,” I said with a smile
So do I, as it turns out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEynAPjDefQ

Anyway, fuck. So far, the story is shaping up surprisingly well. We're 4 chapters and roughly 45,000 words in, and already we've got decent character arcs and a plot involving a central problem. For comparison, by Ch 4 in FoE, Littlepip was still wandering aimlessly around some weapons factory and hadn't even met Calamity yet.

Basic storytelling competency? In my FoE spinoff? Apparently, it's more common than you think.

>>374785

So, they've got an objective now. The plan is to find Sanguine and kill him, which I guess solves both their problems and the Stable's. Assuming the Stable even still exists. That seems like a big 'if', actually. But again: this story at least has a plot, and has done a pretty decent job of sticking to it so far. For comparison, in terms of word count, 45k into FoE would put us at about the point in the story where Littlepip decides, for no reason I've ever been able to discern, to invade a town full of slavers and single-handedly murder all of them. As such, I'm grading Somber's story on a pretty generous curve.

Anyway, in order to take on Sanguine, along with Deus and whoever else is still after them, they are going to need guns and whatnot. Since the best way to gather supplies in the Wasteland seems to involve picking fights with random enemies, BJ decides to investigate some red blips she spots on her radar. Unfortunately, the enemy turns out to be one of those "roboponies" she was warned about earlier. It begins shooting some kind of heat laser at them. However, she is able to clonk it over the head with her baton enough times that eventually it breaks the robot, not the baton. P-21 opens the thing's chest cavity and scoops out whatever electronic bric-a-brac is inside: some "scrap electronics," plus some crystals and a battery and whatever the fuck else.

With that out of the way, it's on to their next adventure. Which, as it turns out, is just more of the same.

BJ moves a little further into the woods or whatever, and finds four more roboponies. The first one she dispatches in the same manner: she clonks it on the head three times, three being the magic number, not four, and not two, but three. Five is right out. Also, the thing's heat laser singes her neck a little while she's fighting it.

She manages to take out two more by lobbing a grenade over a wall. The static geometry in Somber's world seems as indestructible as in kkat's. The last one she takes out the old fashioned way: by clobbering it on the head. Well, I'm glad we got all that sorted out.

There is a building nearby, with some freshly-murdered corpses lying near the door, so naturally BJ and P-21 decide to go investigate. The dead ponies turn out to be Pegasi, which BJ has never seen before. She is just having all sorts of fascinating life experiences since leaving the Stable, isn't she?

Anyway, yada yada yada. They loot the corpses, pick up some kind of magic laser weapon, along with the usual assortment of random crap, and go inside the building, which her PipBuck informs her is called Weather Station 4. Since the two pegasi were obviously killed trying to escape from this place, BJ decides that it would be prudent to go inside and poke around a little. P-21 opts to wait for her outside.

She enters a dimly lit room that, naturally, is full of skeletons. Also, there are more of those fucking robot things. However, BJ decides to change things up a little and kill them with her new zappy-magic-gun-thingy, instead of just bopping them all on the head one at a time. She takes a hit to the chest at one point, but her barding seems to mostly deflect the damage, and a healing potion takes care of the rest.

She continues to explore. She finds some more skeletons and some more pegasus corpses, and also another beam gun and some crystal cartridges for it. She also encounters a locked healing-supply box; she notes its location and resolves to come back with P-21 once the area is clear.

There's something else I've noticed, which falls into our "small improvements" category. BJ doesn't seem to be able to open locks, whereas P-21 can. Anons who remember my FoE review will recall that Littlepip, in addition to her obnoxiously overpowered-underpowered "levitate" spell, her badass stealth-ninja skills that she has because reasons, her expert marksmanship due to SATS, her absurdly high negotiation skills acquired as a side-effect of her crack-mint problem, her nearly-invulnerable body, as well as all the other ridiculous advantages the author gave her over her environment, she also had her lockpicking ability completely maxed out by like the third chapter. Littlepip was basically a one-mare army who could solve virtually any problem on her own without assistance; her friends were just along for the ride. This story seems a little more balanced, in the most literal vidya game sense of the word.

BJ has the same SATS power as LP, but it seems to have more reasonable limits imposed on how often it can be used. She has some basic aptitude at hand-to-hand hoof; whatever combat due to her security training. Apart from that, she has no other apparent skills. P-21 is adept at stealth, lockpicking, and that sort of thing, but seems pretty useless in a fight. In other words, these two are pretty much starting from zero; they each have their strengths and weaknesses, and they need to learn how to function as a team in order to survive. You know, like they would have to if they were characters in the sort of RPG-style game that this world is allegedly based on.

So far, the unremarkable Jane Everymare protagonist is behaving the way you would logically expect her to; nopony is picking up boxcars and lobbing them at alicorns yet. Resisting the temptation to give your protagonist unreasonable advantages or powers, even though she's your kick-ass protagonist and you think she's cool enough to deserve them, is a sign of maturity and good instinct.

Anyway, as BJ explores, it begins to strike her as passing strange that there are so many skeletons in here. I'm not sure what the appropriate number of skeletons is for any given location in this world, but from what I've seen it's quite high.

>There were enough bones for a hundred ponies, and lots of them were quite small.
The bones were small, or the ponies were small? This is an important distinction; it should be made clearer.

>>374816

>As I reached the stairs at the end of the hall I heard the scrape of P-21 entering. No doubt he’d start on the robots in the hall.
Maybe I spoke too soon; it sounds like P-21 might be willing to do some fighting after all. Not sure why he had a change of heart.

Anyway, it goes on like this for a bit. BJ wanders around, sees more skeletons and dead bodies, finds some more junk, and eventually comes to a door, beyond which there appear to be two hostiles and a friendly.

>Reaching the door at the end of the hall, I bit the handle of the pistol, gently gripped the doorhandle with my magic, and slowly turned it, wincing at the grinding noise.
Another small improvement: unlike Littlepip, Blackjack's magic can either hold her gun or operate the door handle, but not both at the same time. She is not able to manipulate thousands of objects simultaneously without any consideration for weight or distance.

Anyway, she doesn't want to just toss a grenade into the room since there's a non-hostile in there, so instead she goes charging in. The two roboponies fire their lazars, and she scampers across the room and hides in the closet. Due to the size of the doorway, the robots can't both enter at once, so she is able to shoot them each at point blank range with her magic beam pistol. The question of whether or not the robots' heat laser weapons are powerful enough to cut through either the walls or the door is never addressed; again, Somber seems to have adopted kkat's video-game rule that architecture is static geometry and is thus usually unaffected by physics. I can't say I agree with this logic, but it is what it is.

With the hostiles dealt with, BJ can now turn her attention to whatever is in this room. She finds a terminal, an automatic pistol (the regular kind, not the magic kind), and some ammo. The non-hostile she saw on her radar turns out to be a pony hiding in a crawlspace under the floor. However, as soon as BJ approaches, the pony apparently decides that she is a threat. The yellow blip turns into a red blip, and the pony begins firing laser blasts at BJ. The scene ends in a page break.

Well, as luck would have it, BJ is fine. Despite being shot point-blank in the face, she appears to have even an even better dodge modifier than Trump. She gets off with a minor burn on the face that a healing potion is able to cure.

The pony who shot her turns out to be a female pegasus. BJ is understandably upset that the pegasus just opened fire on her without asking questions, seeing as how she had been courteous enough not to blow her up with a grenade and all, but P-21 (who arrived sometime in the ether-space between scenes) advises her to go in the bathroom and have a look at her reflection.

>Since when did my eyes fucking glow? Now that I was paying attention to the amber light, it wasn’t the result of light slipping through boarded over windows or emergency lighting. The light came from my eye sockets as if I had a little PipBuck lamp glowing in the back of each. “Well… fuck…” I said lamely as I finished the bottle of lukewarm soda. After everything that had happened in the last three days, I’d finally reached the point of numb acceptance. My eyes were glowing. What could I do about it?
The text has mentioned "amber light" a few times off and on, and I was a little curious what the deal with that was. Apparently, it's due to BJ's eyes having acquired some kind of luminescence. Presumably this is a side-effect of the massive dose of radiation she received earlier.

Anyway, with the whole issue of who-shot-who-and-why more or less resolved, BJ goes back into the main room and has a look at the pegasus she just sort-of rescued:

>She looked pretty ragged. Her black coveralls were torn and stained with waste. She didn’t look like a wastelander. In fact, she looked more rattled than the Crusaders.
iirc, the pegasi in this world are all part of a separatist community called the Enclave that lives in the clouds. It seems like a normie pegasus would have had a similar upbringing to a Stable pony, so presumably this one is as unaccustomed to life in the Wasteland as BJ herself.

Anyway, the details don't seem to matter much. The pegasus is still suspicious of how glowy BJ's eyes are, and so BJ tells her she can just fuck off if she wants to. It turns out that she does in fact want to, and so off is the direction in which she fucks. She may or may not reappear later in the story.

With that out of the way, BJ and P-21 now turn their attention to the terminal:

>I looked at the massive terminal. “So… any clue what that thing is for?”
>“It’s on a security lockout.” He glanced at the piles of ash and the robot recharge bay. “I guess they failed to enter the right password. That activated the sentries.”
>And that meant there was no chance to hack the terminal without ending the lock-out. “Great…” I muttered as I spotted another pegasus skeleton in the corner…
Maybe this is a silly question, but...is there any reason you actually need to mess with this terminal? My understanding is that the two of you only came in here to get supplies, which you've now done. I guess I can understand idle curiosity to a point, but if accessing whatever is on this terminal is more trouble than it's worth...maybe just leave it be?

Well unfortunately, despite Somber's improvements here and there, this kind of logical thinking is still verboten in Edgequestria. BJ examines one of the room's many skeletons and finds a recording cartridge she can play on her PipBuck.

The recording is standard FoE fare: some long-dead NPCs are having a conversation, then everything explodes, then the NPCs die, for some reason in the presence of a running tape recorder. If anyone cares about the details, this building used to be a weather station, there were a bunch of foals sheltering inside when the megaspells went off, they all died, and that's where all the tiny skeletons in this building came from. Very tragic; much sad.

>>374817

>“Kids aren’t doing so good. I’m not doing so good. Fuck. Couldn’t get to Thunderhead now if I wanted. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I contacted Jack Knife at Weather One and Bluebells at Weather Three hours ago. They were told to abandon too. Think Jack left, I dunno. Nopony’s answering anymore. Somepony help us. Anypony.” The recording gave one last crackle and I heard him whisper, “Fuck… they’re fucking kids… fuck…”
>For the longest time I thought that was it. Then I heard a grating rasp that rose and fell. It wasn’t static. “Fuckers… fuckers abandoned us… told me… told me to stop transmitting… switched channels on me… fuckers… didn’t give a shit for the kids.” There was a spate of coughing. “Is that blood? Shit… it is, isn’t it? Fuck… Dash was right… I thought… shit… Fucking right… fuck…”
As a side note, this recording might have unlocked some kind of Steam achievement for largest number of fucks in a single log entry.

Anyway, as the recording plays, the sad violin music swells. BJ pounds the ground with her hoof, tears streaming down her face, as she curses the...humanity...of the situation? Ponanaity? Poonanny? Equanimity? Inanity? Oh, who gives a fuck anyway?

>Damn it! I’d been fine when the bones were just bones. I didn’t want to think of dozens of foals dying slowly of radiation poisoning while someone, somewhere, casually let them die. “How could they?”
It's actually much easier than you'd think. It literally would have required no action whatsoever.

>I spotted her hiding in the doorway, sitting down on the floor looking at her hooves. “There was nothing we could do,” she said in a soft, buzzing drawl. “After the bombs went off… every pegasus that could get home was recalled. We had to save as much as we could.”
Wait, what? Is this the same pegasus as before? Unless I'm misunderstanding what's going on here, this pony would have to be 200+ years old to have witnessed these events. Has she been here all this time? How, and why?

Well, after reading a little further, I think I might have taken her statement too literally. Here's the deal with the pegasus:

Her name is Morning Glory. She is a member of the Volunteer Corps, which is some kind of Enclave civilian unit working to reestablish contact with the surface world. She and a bunch of other pegasi were sent down here with gifts and supplies and what-have-you, on a mission to make contact with any ponies they could find. For whatever insane reason, they were not provided with any weapons or any combat training.

In a surprise twist that will surprise no one, the first surface-ponies her group encountered were a pack of raiders, who proceeded to rape them, murder them, rape them again, eat the corpses, call them names, pee on them, bum smokes off of them, borrow money they had no intention of paying back; they just did absolutely awful stuff to them. Worst weekend those poor little pegasus buggers ever had.

Morning Glory and a few others somehow managed to get away and hole up in this abandoned weather station, which they were horrified to discover is full of the skeletons of dead children left behind or murdered or something by the Enclave 200 years ago. They wanted to boot up this terminal for whatever the fuck silly reason, and wound up accidentally triggering the security system. Morning Glory was in the crawlspace futzing with some wires when the shooty-robots started shooting, and was the only one who survived. The rest is history.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that Morning Glory seems to be in a bit of a state. Blackjack, speaking from all of her two days of Wasteland experience, suggests bloody rampage as the best cure for depression. She proposes that if Morning Glory joins the party, together they will get revenge for the deaths of her comrades, protect the surviving Crusaders from future abduction by this specific group of raiders at least, have good wholesome fun committing mass murder, and replenish their supplies, all in one fell swoop. If you don't believe me, read it in her own words:

>I let out a long sigh. “Actually, no. First, I don’t want anypony caught by raiders if I can do something about it. Secondly, I don’t like the idea of raiders having beam weapons taken off your comrades. Thirdly, there might be five young fillies in this area and I don’t like the idea of them getting captured again. Fourthly, I need caps and ammunition and taking it from murdering scum sounds fine to me,” I said as I listed them all off, rolling my eyes in thought. “Oh yeah, and it’s fun. You’ll find that out if you come with us.”
Straight from the horse's mouth, as it were. Morning Glory mostly just seems surprised that BJ wants her along in the first place. Maybe she smells or something.

>“Sure. Your friends were attacked and killed. You’ve been trapped in a coffin under a terminal for a week. I’m pretty sure some part of you wants some payback.”
She was hiding in that crawlspace for a whole week? What was she eating? Where was she going to the bathroom? Or should I even ask?

Anyway, it's looking like Morning Glory is going to be this story's quiet, gentle Fluttershy-type character. BJ has to coax and cajole her quite a bit, but she reluctantly agrees to join, though it seems like she doesn't fully trust BJ just yet.

Oh, also:

>“Oh no. The Volunteer Corps are issued surplus arms and armor separate from security and scouting forces.”
Looks like I made a minor mistake earlier. I thought she had said that the Volunteer Corps were sent down unarmed; it looks like I read that bit wrong:

> “I… all my friends… we were sent to make contact… we had gifts… no heavy weapons. No power armor.”
Looks like they weren't given heavy weapons or power armor, but they still had light arms, hence the blasty-pistol she used to shoot Blackjack in the face earlier.

Anyway, MG does some repair work on the blasty-pistols they have in their possession, and BJ comments that she seems skilled. This provides a segue into her backstory.

>>374819

From the bits and pieces of poorly-fleshed-out backstory in kkat's abortion of a fic, we know that the Grand Pegasus Enclave is basically a modern, civilized state that exists in the clouds. The pegasi pulled out towards the end of the war and sealed themselves off, and were thus able to stave off the worst of the devastation that befell the rest of Equestria.

Since 200 years have passed, there now appears to be some internal controversy about whether or not the pegasi should rejoin the surface world and try to help it rebuild. Morning Glory appears to have been part of some kind of youth-led political movement in favor of re-establishing contact:

>“I… I was a student at the Thunderhead academy,” she flushed. “There were some protests… nothing serious. Just a lot of us wanting to come down. That’s why the Volunteer Corps were established.” And ripped to pieces by raiders. Convenient.
The establishment of the Volunteer Corps seems to have been a rather shrewd move by the Enclave government.

A group of bleeding-heart luvvie college students think that the Enclave should help the poor, starving ponies of the Wasteland below. To emphasize this point, they stage some mostly-peaceful protests with probably just a few small fires. However, instead of either suppressing them or indulging them, the Enclave elects to give them exactly what they asked for, to the letter.

The protestors are assembled into a shoddy, undisciplined proto-military unit, given two weeks worth of simple combat training, armed with shoddy weapons and armor, and dropped into the Wasteland to "establish contact." It goes about as you'd expect: the Wasteland tears them to pieces in a matter of days. Think "bleeding-heart white girl goes on spirit journey to connect with the poor starving Negroids, gets culturally enriched."

The not-so-subtle implication is that this is exactly the outcome the Enclave wanted. They settled a hot-button political issue and got rid of an annoying group of troublemakers all in one fell swoop, and managed to pull it off in the most cost-effective and optics-friendly way possible. Honestly? Sounds like the kind of thing we should be doing with BLM protesters and the like. So far I'm liking the Enclave more and more.

>“Well, your call,” I said, gathering up Brolly’s remains in a bag.
Wait, who's Brolly again?

>Outside, I found a tree and cleared out a hole at its base with my horn. There wasn’t room or time to do anything fancy, so I set the bag into the depression and covered it once again.
Oh, right, that guy from the recording earlier that she was going to dig a grave for.

>I levitated a pointed rock and scratched out ‘Brolly’ and ‘He tried.’ on the trunk.
If Somber keeps playing his cards right, he might end up being remembered the same way. Personally, I think "Won't someone please think of the children?!?" would have made a better epitaph for Brolly, but it is what it is.

Anyway, after taking the time to dig a grave and carve a personalized tombstone for Brolly, the three ponies pack up their bags and head west, leaving the bones of literally hundreds of dead children, as well as the decomposing corpses of Morning Glory's fellow Volunteers, untouched and unburied in the halls of Weather Station 4 with nary a thought. What the hell is it with this setting and selective sympathy for the dead, anyway?

Page break. The trio sallies forth, on their way to murder some raiders, apparently.

>As we journeyed back towards the west, I let Glory take some potshots at the bloatsprites. She could shoot when she worked up the nerve. I couldn’t begin to guess how she aimed a weapon like that with no sights, but between a half dozen bloatsprites and one radhog I was pleasantly impressed.
Oh look, little miss "I've been in the Wasteland for all of like two frickin days" is suddenly a battle-hardened combat vet. Since it's been established that she's had at least some basic firearms training as a result of her role in Security, I'll grudgingly add it to the list of Somber's small improvements. Still though, her inner Littlepip is starting to show, and I can't say I like it.

Anyway, as they walk, we learn a little more about the current situation. It seems that the Enclave is conducting limited outreach operations across the Wasteland, mostly through "volunteer" civilian groups like Morning Glory's. We are also told that the Enclave is conducting diplomatic missions as well, though I'm not sure how that would work since the Wasteland is literal anarchy. Who exactly are they sending diplomats to?

There is apparently some pushback from various Wasteland factions; the Steel Rangers in particular don't seem to like the Enclave. Blackjack is rather suspicious of their intentions as well. Morning Glory, however, seems to have complete faith in what she and her fellow pegasi are trying to do.

Anyway, it turns out the raiders' hideout is an old donut shop. They approach, and BJ's PipBuck detects one lone sentry wandering around out back. She decides to dispatch him first.

>I approached as quietly as I was able, baton floating beside me as the raider let out a rather epic bowel movement. He’d probably have to kill it with a shovel afterwards.
So the raider was going outside to poop? He's not just going to shit all over his own mattress like the rest of them do? What a refined chap; it's a shame he has to die.

BJ tries to reason with him out of compassion or as a gesture of goodwill to Morning Glory or something. It doesn't work, so ultimately she just clobbers him to death with her baton. That's one down.

>A pulpy noise that oddly matched his bowels filled the air and his whole body jerked and fell flat next to his reeking pile of filth.
Whoever said this fandom's literature was lacking in artistic taste?

>Something we haven't encountered yet called a Robopony:

> >“That’s what they are, so don’t you laugh. Pony gadgets wandering all over the Core. Dangerous critters, too. You see a pony made of wires and lights, you best run. Can’t kill ‘em.”

This is interesting to recall when reading your latest posts. I can understand a small street urchin being wary of certain monsters that adults find easier to handle, but she says this almost definitively, as if it is a particular trait of them to consider. However it's most likely exaggeration, and they are simply too tough to bother with.

I bring this up because Blackjack goes in and casually kills several of them with little real effort, even bashing a couple with an antipersonnel security baton. It reminds me how FO:E had all sorts of monsters who should be a problem to deal with or are hyped up to be dangerous and end up being shitty mindless fodder for the protagonist to easily cleave through.

>>374822

BJ decides to sneak in through the back door of the donut shop I could probably make a joke here, but this scene is low-brow enough as it is. She encounters the usual mess associated with raider dwellings:

>Old donut making equipment stood coated in black and crimson sludge. The stench coming out the door was so intense that I almost retched. Flies buzzed over every surface, and there was an industrial mixer with limbs sticking out. There seemed to be more than a few wings. Maggots thrived in great squirming lumps that popped underhoof as I moved in as carefully as I could.
Why even fight the raiders? Seems like you could just leave them alone and let dysentery finish them off. Although to be fair, the conditions here are probably more sanitary than your average California homeless encampment.

Anyway, another lone raider wanders into this kitchen area, and BJ takes her out quietly using her security baton. She then goes into the main dining room or whatever, blasts two of them using one or other of her guns I'm not entirely sure which ones; she mentions an automatic at one point. Then, one of the raiders tosses a grenade at her, but it seems to do more damage to the raider BJ was fighting than it does to her.

Next, she encounters yet another raider who has some kind of high-powered beam cannon he wears like a harness. Her S.A.T.S. is still recharging so she can't use it for the moment small improvements. The weapon proves formidable, and BJ is forced to give ground.

>“Flash! Flash flash flash!” he screamed in glee over and over again as he stepped outside.
Dude is nostalgic for a classic browser extension; can't fault him for that.

Anyway, as if having some kind of super-powerful weapon weren't enough, it turns out that this guy is also wearing a helmet that is powerful enough to deflect every shot BJ fires at him. This seems implausible enough on its own, to say nothing of BJ landing multiple headshots without S.A.T.S. against a moving target who also has her under heavy fire, but we'll put a pin in that for now.

Suddenly, Morning Glory appears on the roof, which I guess is caved in or has a hole in it or something, and fires a few badly-aimed shots at Giga-Nigga. It doesn't do much more than draw his attention.

>“Shoot!” P-21 and I shouted in unison.
Where is P-21 in all of this? My understanding was that BJ had left him outside with the dead raider sentry, and had gone into the donut shop by herself.

Anyway, Morning Glory sensibly fires at the beam gun instead of the guy, and Giga-Nigga's beam-gun thingie is now disabled. However, instead of trying to finish him off, Morning Glory tries to convince him to run away or surrender or something. He doesn't, opting instead to grab a shovel from somewhere and start swinging it at BJ, who takes yet another injury to her face. She fires a few more badly aimed shots that do little damage.

BJ is now down to two bullets. Her SATS now apparently recharged, she fires both of them into Giga-Nigga's head, apparently forgetting that he is wearing some kind of magic helmet, possibly made from the same physics-proof material that all of the buildings in this setting seem to be made from. The shots do no damage, and BJ has no choice but to start whapping him with her baton.

>Suddenly Glory appeared above him and fired every single shot left in the beam cartridge. One shot seemed to consume him in a bright red glow that fully engulfed him and sent him collapsing into a heap of ash at my hooves. I scrambled back as Glory continued to fire, tears on her cheeks as she landed. When the gun was empty she spat it out, screaming at the smoking pile of ash, “I only wanted to help! I wanted to help!” She then shook and voided her stomach as she staggered to the side, weeping. I did the only thing I could; I put my hooves around her and held her close as she shook and whimpered over and over again that simple plea.
Couple of issues here. First and most obvious is: why didn't BJ take at least one of these beam guns with her? My understanding is they had picked up a couple of them, and she's already seen that they are pretty effective weapons. Second: how is BJ putting her hooves around Morning Glory? BJ is on the ground, and Morning Glory is on the roof. Does BJ just have really long front legs, or did Morning Glory descend from the roof to the ground at some point?

This gives us a bit of a clue:
>I scrambled back as Glory continued to fire, tears on her cheeks as she landed.
"She landed" implies that she was in the air, flying or gliding or something. However, the author has not explicitly mentioned her being in the air, so all we can do here is assume. It's important to watch stuff like this: in fight scenes (all action scenes, really), where your characters are in physical space is extremely important. The reader should not be asking questions like "is Morning Glory flying, or is she still standing on the roof?"

Anyway, the scene ends in a page break. We rejoin the party later that evening. They have found an abandoned trailer to hole up in; BJ and P-21 are discussing whether or not MG's pacifistic attitude makes her a liability. MG herself appears to be sleeping nearby. We learn that the defeated raiders had very little to offer in terms of loot, which again raises the question: what exactly was this most recent fight supposed to accomplish? Revenge or something?

>I’d try using a beam pistol for now; we had twice as much ammo for that as we did for the automatic. How I missed my shotgun.
Why exactly is she so picky about what guns she uses? Seems to me like the beam guns are pretty effective.

>I’d give sexual favors for a laundromat right now.
Really? You'd give sexual favors to everyone in a laundromat? Why? Oh wait, I see; what you're saying is that you'd give sexual favors in return for access to a laundromat. You'll want to word this less ambiguously; the joke is ruined if the reader has to think about it.

>>375188

Anyway, the current controversy seems to be whether or not Morning Glory is too naive and emotional to use weapons. P-21 argues that arming her makes her more of a liability than an asset, while BJ maintains that they need more than one fighter in the party.

The issue never gets resolved; the conversation just sort of peters out, BJ drifts through her inner monologue for awhile, and then she turns on her PipBuck radio. She scans stations for a bit, until she eventually settles on one that is playing an old song apparently recorded by Sweetie Belle. This is followed by a little commentary from our old buddy DJ Pon3:

>“Turns out the road between Manehattan and the Hoof is just a little safer now thanks to a pair of ponies fresh from a stable. You’re gonna love this… looks like the Hoof has just a little more Security than a few days ago. That’s right, she’s got it displayed loud and proud. She’s already carved up the raiders from Withers all the way to Megamart, and she doesn’t look like she’s going to be stopping any time soon. So here’s a big thank you from DJ Pon3 to the Security Mare. Looking forward to seeing what law and order you bring down next.”
In keeping with the tropes of its predecessor, it seems that Project Horizons' radio DJ is inexplicably paying close attention to the story's protagonist. This is implausible for the same reason it was implausible in kkat's story: BJ hasn't really done anything all that remarkable yet, so there's no reason her actions should receive any special recognition. She takes down one nest of raiders and suddenly she's a famous folk hero? Really?

Anyway, BJ is more angry than flattered by her newfound fame. She gripes that if Deus and his party is listening to the broadcast, it will make it that much easier for him to pin down her location, which is actually a pretty good point. The DJ was an implausible and awkward character, basically a game mechanic from Fallout 3 clumsily transposed into kkat's world. Since she eventually became a major character I suppose anyone writing a derivative work would have no choice but to treat her as canon; however, I probably would have downplayed her role in this story.

Anyway, the chapter ends here.

>Footnote: Level Up.
>New Perk: Friend of the Night - Your eyes adapt quickly to low-light situations.

>>375189
I have no idea if I'm remembering this correctly, but didn't Frank feed DJ Pon3 information about LittlePoop's activities in kkat's original? That would explain how she knows about BJ, but again it is probable I'm misremembering and giving both authors too much credit.

>>375189

Chapter 5: Work

>Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
>By Somber
>Chapter 5: Work
Ah, good. It hasn't turned into Bonfire of the Vanities yet. Thanks for letting me know. Every time I click that 'next' button I get a little twinge of anxiety.

>“Step one… stay alive. Step two… I dunno. Step three… profit!”
This, of course, is a well-known quote from Milton Friedman.

>So. That’s Hoofington. The Hoof. Or ‘the Core’ if you were talking about the inner city where all the technological marvels were supposed to be. Glory had been filling us in all morning as we continued along the decayed road. But now, as it rose into an overpass, I had my first look at the city. And I didn’t like it one bit.
Why exactly are they going here again? As I recall, the plan was to find this Sanguine character and take him out. Is there any reason to believe he might be in Hoofington? Or are they just starting here because they don't have any better ideas?

Anyway, we are given a brief description of Hoofington. The Core is located on an island in the center of a river, which seems heavily contaminated with green and pink radioactive sludge. Due to limited space, the ponies built vertically, and so the Core area consists mostly of giant skyscrapers that quite literally extend as high as the clouds. The cloud cover seems to also be radioactive, so I'm guessing this is a no-go zone for the Enclave. The banks of the river are covered with the ruins of an urban sprawl. There appears to be only one highway and one bridge across the river and into the Core.

>But what mattered to the three of us was the massive square building beyond the overpass. The building was surrounded by a berm of scrapped carts, sky carriages, and other debris. Four large turrets clung to the corners, sweeping their long barrels back and forth. Bright neon lights flickered in the rainy gray weather: ‘Megamart’, they said, and beneath that in bright red paint was ‘Finders Keepers’. Unless I was mistaken, this was the headquarters of the Finders.
Is this where they were going initially? I seem to recall the Crusaders were the ones who originally suggested going to Hoofington, and they were also the ones who had business dealings with the Finders. Still, though, I'm not sure why BJ & Co. would need to seek these guys out, unless they're planning to barter with them or something.

Anyway, it looks like the trio's next stop is the decaying ruins of Pony Wal-Mart. They approach the building, and are stopped at the entrance by a sentry who informs them that they have to pay an admission fee of 5 caps per head (or 10 per Bessy, whatever that means). However, it seems that due to BJ's newfound radio stardom, the Finders are inclined to let her in free of charge. They advise her to speak to the Manager, because apparently she was asking about her.

>“You can be sore about the reputation or you can use it. Not both,” P-21 replied casually. I stuck my tongue out at him, much to Glory’s surprise.
Why is this gesture surprising to Glory? If it's not obvious and you're not going to elaborate, just don't mention it at all.

Anywho, they go inside. It's basically what you'd expect: a giant ruined Wal-Mart that's been converted into a weapons and armor bazaar. It seems to function as more or less neutral territory: ponies of all sorts, including raiders, are all wandering around in here shopping. Presumably the rules are similar to an Old West saloon, where the establishment will serve anyone provided they keep their guns holstered and don't cause trouble.

A mare wearing a Megamart name tag approaches them and helpfully explains how everything works. Apparently, pre-war Hoofington had a large number of military bases, and after the bombs went off all the military equipment was just lying around. The Finders purchase any war materiel that anyone brings in.

It goes without saying that she has already heard of the "legendary" "Security Mare" and her "heroic" "exploits":

>Her eyes looked at my security barding and she smiled. “Ah, you’re the mare who cleared the Manehattan highway!”
>“Yeah. It’s not a big deal. It just sort of happened,” I said with an awkward smile. She gave me a very calculating look that made me shift awkwardly. “I mean, they were just raiders. Anypony would have killed them.”
>“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” she said as she looked at me with a cool little smile. “Anypony would have given them a wide berth while they tried to extort my caravans. You were the one that shut them down. Perhaps not a big deal to you, but we’ve lost six caravans in as many months. Trade to Tenpony and Gutterville was down to a trickle.”
We are once again veering into kkat-level implausibility.

The Raiders BJ just took out were a tiny group, based in an unfortified donut shop. By my count there were a grand total of five of them. The only advantage they had were the beam weapons they'd stolen from Morning Glory's group, which they only would have had for about a week. BJ, armed with a couple of pistols, her security baton, and very little ammo, basically just waltzed in there and took them out by herself.

This "Megamart" is an organized operation, and they have guns out the wazoo. Are we honestly supposed to believe that five retards camped out in an old ruin were able to waylay six of their caravans over six months, and they did absolutely nothing about it? That this tiny band of poorly-organized lunatics was so intimidating that the average Wastelander is willing to go ten miles out of her way just to avoid them, even though all it took to bring them down was one retard with basically no combat experience just walking in there with no plan and clearing the place out? That this "Finders" faction, which obviously has enough muscle and firepower to fearlessly operate this weapons bazaar, and has an economic interest in removing the raiders, took no action whatsoever? *presses X to doubt*

>>375192
>didn't Frank feed DJ Pon3 information
I forgot to mention it, but this is what BJ assumes is going on. iirc, in kkat's story, the DJ actually has access to a huge network of observation towers, that allows her to monitor just about everything that happens. I don't recall if Frank was involved or not, but it would be believable if he was.

I initially remember thinking it was implausible that the DJ would be paying so much attention to LP, with or without the observation towers, since she wasn't doing anything particularly remarkable. Later, when it's revealed that she is a fellow dyke-horse who has a crush on LP, it at least becomes somewhat plausible from that perspective: she watches her because she likes her, and talks up her relatively mundane exploits on air the same way a teenage girl will yap moronically about the boy she likes to anyone that will listen. So far there's no reason to believe anything similar is going on with Blackjack, but who knows.

>>374847
I'd actually forgotten that the Crusaders had played up the roboponies as a major threat, but you're absolutely right.

> It reminds me how FO:E had all sorts of monsters who should be a problem to deal with or are hyped up to be dangerous and end up being shitty mindless fodder for the protagonist to easily cleave through.
This was a yuge issue in kkat's story, and was one of many things I remember that bothered me quite a bit. The Hellhounds I remember being a pretty egregious example of this, as was the Pink Cloud. There were all sorts of precautions the protagonists were advised to take, which they blatantly didn't take, and yet they were still able to deal with these threats pretty effortlessly.

>>375194

>She reached into her vest and took out a small plastic bag filled with caps. “Consider this a ‘thank you’ from the Finders,” she said as she tossed it to me with a smile.
>“Well, it was a standing contract. I am fairly sure you’ll spend it here, so I’ll recover some of it from the vendors. And if it outfits you, well, the more likely you’ll bring in profitable goods in the future,” Bottlecap said, regarding him with an even look as her explanation mollified him.
This at least somewhat clarifies things. Apparently the Finders had an open contract on the raider nest, so at least they were attempting to do something about it, even if that something didn't amount to much more than farming the work out to anyone who wanted to make 500 caps. However, I'm still calling bullshit here: the raiders presented a minor threat at best, and it stands to reason there would be any number of professional bounty-hunters/mercenaries of varying skill levels who would be tempted to at least try to bring them down. In the event of the contract standing open for six months with no takers, and the Finders losing significant revenue from the caravans in the meantime, it stands to reason they would just handle it themselves.

Anyway, the banter continues. We learn that, apparently, Enclave ponies are not allowed inside the Megamart. Whether this is an Enclave rule or a Megamart rule is not clarified. In any event, for some reason or other it doesn't seem to apply to Morning Glory, since nopony tries to kick her out and she doesn't leave.

BJ brings up the subject of the EC-1101 file. The manager the mare with the name tag seems to be the manager they were told to speak to informs her that data analysis is indeed a service they offer, but it does not come cheap. She quotes her a price of ten thousand caps.

So, again, while there are still plenty of faults and silly elements in this story, I will at least commend it for more or less adhering to a central plot. The protagonist has two clear long-term goals at present: figure out what the deal with this file is, and kill this Sanguine guy. In order to pursue the first goal, she needs to earn 10,000 caps, which is a mid-term goal that will no doubt propel her into any number of situations that will create short-term goals to drive the story along.

Again, we can compare this to the structure of the original FoE:

Velvet Remedy disappears, and Littlepip wants to solve the mystery of where she disappeared to and why. LP leaves the stable, immediately gives up on this goal, then wanders around aimlessly for multiple chapters. Eventually, through a series of more or less random events, she stumbles upon some kind of "heal the Wasteland" spell that gives her a long-term goal, as well as a couple of unrelated mid-term goals (find and defuse a bomb in Tenpony Tower, kill the Goddess for What's-His-Name). Along the way, she ends up fulfilling the original goal (find Velvet Remedy, figure out why she left) more or less by accident, and the answer to the big mystery turns out to be utterly mundane anyway. In the process of attempting to solve the three main goals of the later story, she keeps needlessly taking on unrelated side-missions without any apparent concern for the time-sensitive nature of her two mid-term goals. Eventually, she solves both of the mid-term goals in one fell swoop, then wanders around aimlessly solving side missions for a few more chapters, then the Enclave shows up for some reason, and then yada yada yada the gardens of equestria and whatever. In short: the book is an absolute clusterfuck with little in the way of plot or structure, and what plot it has makes little sense.

Now, that said, I would like to remind everyone that we are only on Chapter 5 of Project Horizons, out of a grand total of 77. There is plenty of opportunity yet for this story to go off the rails, and I fully expect that it will at some point. From what I've heard about this story, Blackjack ends up becoming some kind of alcoholic sex-crazed cyborg, and eventually she travels to the moon. However, I am more than willing to give Somber credit where credit is due. So far, this story reads like the original FoE, with some minor improvements to the formula. Those minor improvements make all the difference.

Anyway, fuck; point is, BJ now needs to earn ten thousand caps so she can get her file decoded. As it turns out, the manager can offer some assistance here:

>“We don’t just find things. We also handle ponies looking for special help. Sometimes it’ll be retrieving goods, other times it’s contract work like clearing out nests of dangerous wildlife or bounty hunting.”
If they're this organized, and are this plugged-in to the various mercenary networks around Edgequestria, it makes even less sense that a tiny disorganized group of bandits operating out of a fucking donut shop would have given them this much grief.

Anyway, fuck; point is, they can make money taking kill-for-hire contracts, so I'm assuming that's what they'll be spending most of the near future doing. BJ wants to have P-21 read over the contracts and decide on which ones they should take, because blah blah morals and whatever. While she's thinking of it, she mentions that oh btw, P-21 has a badly injured leg and needs serious medical attention. The manager informs her that surgery will be almost as expensive as data retrieval, but there's an abandoned hospital not far that would probably have what they need.

The hospital is the usual deal: it's a massive treasure trove of extremely valuable medical supplies, but in 200 years nopony has looted the place because it's full of monsters and whatever. But surely this inexperienced dipshit security-mare, armed with a couple of handguns and her two useless friends, will be able to clear out the monsters without much difficulty.

Anyway, since she has delivered her infodump and serves no further purpose, the manager-mare NPC wanders away.

>>375203

Next stop, the doctor's tent. BJ, still injured and still apparently radioactive or something, elects to spend 125 of their 500 caps on something call the "patchwork and purge" special. Well, I guess you've got to spend money to make money.

The doctor makes a few snide remarks about her condition, and refers to her by her new "Security" nickname. Unfortunately, it looks like this is just how things are going to be from now on. The Wasteland has a new "Lightbringer," apparently.

>He looked at me coolly. “Girl, I’ve been in the Wasteland a while now and outlived my children and grandchildren. If there’s one thing more precious than clean water and bullets, it’s the feeling that tomorrow you’re less likely to die than today. Those raiders might be replaced by some other band, but yesterday we nearly had a party when we’d heard we could send caravans safely to Manehattan again. That might be nonsense to you, but it means the world to us.”
Once again, the nonsensical and thoughtless way this setting was originally slapped together rears its ugly head. Earlier, when the Crusaders were explaining the Wasteland to Blackjack, I was beginning to hope that Somber's goal was to construct a more plausible, balanced version of kkat's Wasteland, and a story that didn't revolve as heavily around one massively overpowered (and overrated) protagonist. Unfortunately, though, it's looking like he's probably just going to stick to the original formula.

On the one hand, the Wasteland is supposed to be this lawless, unforgiving Wild West scenario where the slightest misstep can get you killed. On the other, you have characters like Blackjack and Littlepip, who, despite having essentially no real combat experience, are able to just emerge from the Stable one day and start effortlessly taking out baddies left and right, and they're lauded as heroes for it.

In and of itself, Blackjack's most recent achievement isn't implausible. As I explained, the raider group she attacked was small and poorly organized, and likely didn't know how to make effective use of the advanced weapons they'd stolen from the pegasi. With a combination of luck and bravery, it's not hard to imagine anyone doing what BJ just did; in fact, BJ says as much herself. What makes it implausible is that this relatively minor accomplishment is being lauded to the degree that it is. It's implausible that a group like the Finders, which is clearly well-organized and well-armed, would have allowed such a minor threat to disrupt their operations for a whole six months. It's implausible that, in the cruel, unforgiving, dog-eat-dog Wasteland, there is not one other group besides Blackjack's willing to venture into an abandoned Dunkin Donuts and take out a small gang of poorly-organized thugs.

From the earlier conversation between BJ and the Crusaders, I had hoped that Somber was planning to structure his tale differently from how kkat did. Even if the eventual goal is to have BJ become some kind of ultra-badass Wasteland hero, at this point in the story she should not be anything more than one pony trying to eke out an existence in an unforgiving world, same as everyone else. Others, including factions like the Finders and the Steel Rangers, have been doing it for far longer and are likely much better at it. We should not be hearing about BJ's exploits on the radio until she's actually done something radio-worthy.

If taking out a tiny band of Raiders, who are weak and badly-organized enough that one mare can slaughter them with a couple of handguns and a security baton, is indeed considered a heroic feat worthy of the ten o'clock news, it throws the plausibility of the entire setting into question. How have the Finders managed to hold onto this massive store of weaponry, to say nothing of the mountain of caps they seem to be sitting on, for as long as they have, if some tiny band of poorly-organized thugs camping out on the highway can pose this much of a threat to them? How have any of the ponies in this world survived for as long as they have, if they are this easily cowed and intimidated? It makes absolutely no sense.

Anyway, fuck. BJ gets herself patched up at the Doctor's office, and then she meets up with her friends again. She explains that they now need to earn ten thousand bottle caps if they want to decrypt what is probably just the Overfilly's r34 folder. While the obvious solution would be to whore P-21 out to a thousand fat mares at ten caps a pop, Morning Glory actually has a better idea: why not go to the Enclave's Skyport? She believes that the Enclave would probably be willing to decrypt the file for free in return for delivering one of their operatives safe and sound.

BJ, still not sure if she ought to trust the Enclave, decides she needs more information. Out of absolutely nowhere, on the basis of some offhanded comment made by Brolly in one of his 200 year old diary entries, BJ asks Morning Glory who Rainbow Dash is. We then learn that Rainbow Dash was a hero of the war, who later gained infamy for suggesting that the pegasi go down to the irradiated surface world to help evacuate mudponies and unicorns. When the pegasus council told her no, she said "well screw you guys then" and ran off to go do some stuff or whatever, and was never seen again. She remains a controversial figure in history to this day.

Morning Glory herself seems to have ambivalent feelings about her. Her view is that, while she respect's Dash's desire to help the surface ponies, if she had been a little less impulsive and listened to the council, she could have done more good in the long run. Or something.

Anywho, with that important topic out of the way, BJ now poses another non-sequitur question:

>I had to admit my mane was itching in curiosity. “So, what’s life in the clouds like?”
>Again, clearly not a question she expected.
Not a question anyone expected, or should have expected. Seriously, this is not how conversation works.

>>375311

Morning Glory does her best to answer:

>“Um… it’s different. That’s all I can really say,” she said softly. “We’re not supposed to discuss Thunderhead. It’s all classified.”
Wtf is Thunderhead again? Was that mentioned already? Yeesh, so many flippin' factions and terms and locations and secret projects in this world. I'm starting to get war flashbacks from trying to keep track of everything in kkat's absolute clusterfuck.

>Time for a topic change!
In order to have a topic change, you need to have a topic to begin with. Seriously, this is not how conversation works.

>“So, P-21. Have you seen their little bulletin board? I’m pretty sure if we can knock out some jobs, sell any salvage we don’t need, and get lucky then we might be able to get that ten thousand caps pretty quick.”
So...they're not going to the Enclave's Skyport? Then what was the point of even bringing it up?

Anyway, P-21 goes through the contracts on offer. Using some unspecified methodology, he separates the ones he thinks they should take from the ones he thinks they shouldn't take. In the end, he settles on three: collecting radscorpion venom pouches, rousting some squatters in the Fluttershy Medical Center (the same hospital that was mentioned by the Manager earlier), and infiltrating a place called Ironshod Firearms and retrieving some computer parts. The scene ends in a page break.

We rejoin the party at some indeterminate point in the future. They appear to have taken on the "radscorpion" contract first. They are currently surrounded by the vicious little buggers, trying to gun them all down.

>S.A.T.S. had finally failed me, too. The targeting and time manipulation spell might have slowed things down, but it didn’t stop time. By the time it finished, two of the radscorpions were dead, but the remainder had put new holes in my forelegs with their razor-sharp pincers.
Even though my initially high hopes for this story are fading, it's still nice to see the author imposing some reasonable limitations on the heroine's toolkit.

>The gravel pit was filled with rusted machinery that made Morning Glory’s job infinitely harder.
Wait, what is her job again?

>She had to swoop under and around the girders, busted conveyors, and decaying equipment to try and follow me as I blasted ammo like crazy. She proved much more adept with the beam pistol fighting insects than ponies. I had no clue how she could aim the boxy contraption clenched in her teeth, but the soft ‘crak’ of each shot mixed well with the throaty ‘boom’ of my shotgun.
So...I guess...her job is now air support? Like what's-his-nuts from the first one? Calumny, or Caligari, or Caligula, or Count Chocula, or whatever the fuck? Calamity; that was his name.

Anyway, point is, there's a bunch of fucking scorpions and they're trying to kill them all. Yada yada yada, they kill them all. Yay. Then, suddenly, a really ginormous one crawls out of the ground. Oh noes.

>It was as large as three ponies combined, with pincers large enough to snip my limbs and head like a daisy… well… pictures of daisies. I always thought they were flimsy looking flowers… but why was I thinking about flowers now? Its tail struck with such force that I could imagine it going right through me.
I haven't commented much on the prose quality in this story, but in case anyone was wondering, this is a pretty good example of the kind of shit I've been dealing with.

Anyway, yada yada yada, it's a big-ass scorpion. Their guns and shotguns and beam guns and whatever the fuck else they have aren't strong enough to hurt it, and blah blah blah yakkity-schmackity. Herp de derp derp doo, Blackjack lobs a grenade into its mouth and pulls the pin, assuming this will be enough to kill it. Unfortunately, it seems that the grenade she threw was a "shock grenade," which only works on robots. Oh, dear; poor Blackjack. Scrambled eggs all over her face.

Anyway, flibbidy bibbidy, Morning Glory tries to grab BJ and fly her to safety, but the scorpion stabs her and they both fall. Cue comedic sound effect. BJ lands on the roof of a nearby steel crane, while Morning Glory lands in the path of the scorpion. The scorpion begins to skitter towards her. Cue dramatic music.

BJ, having flashbacks to the last time she did something stupid and got one of her companions killed, vows "never again," and leaps for the scorpion. Cue inspiring action music.

She lands on its back, goes berserk with her shotgun and manages to blast its tail off. She then rides its back for awhile, waiting for her S.A.T.S. to recharge, and when it does she pulls the same trick and severs one of its claws. She then fires her remaining shots into the back of its head, cracks the carapace, and beats the shit out of its brain with the gun butt until eventually it dies. Cue victory music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgUksX6eM0Y

Anyway, now that the fighting is over, they take some healing potions and whatever. Morning Glory seems a bit woozy; I suspect she was poisoned by the scorpion. But we'll put a pin in that for now. P-21, who apparently knows how to find and remove a radscorpion's poison gland for some reason, starts collecting the glands. Meanwhile, BJ finds the skeletons of some less-fortunate adventurers and begins looting their bodies. She replenishes her ammo, adds another rifle to her growing collection of guns, and also finds a Crusader cape. She has some sort of ethical dilemma about taking it, or wearing it, or something, and then ultimately decides to just tear off the patch and stick it in her pocket.

She rejoins the group, and oh noes, it looks like I was right; Morning Glory has been poisoned. MG claims that she knows how to synthesize an antidote by mixing healing potions with scorpion venom, but she needs access to a laboratory. Well, as luck would have it, the next place they were planning to go, Ironshod Farms R&D or whatever, has one.

And so, it's onward to the next adventure.

>>375312

>Ironshod Firearms; I could have worked for these ponies. I really could have. Just looking at the faded pictures of firearms sitting over desks was enough to make my insides moist.
Apparently, Blackjack is now some kind of obsessive gun fetishist. I'm not entirely sure how, when or why this happened, but it's been mentioned a few times before. Prior to leaving the Stable, she hadn't expressed any strong feelings about guns, and hadn't had much exposure to them. Nothing about her ever suggested she might have or eventually develop this sort of interest. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it feels sudden, like in the original when LP suddenly became interested in books out of absolutely nowhere.

Anyway, fuck. They're in this Ironshod Firearms factory now, getting shot at by robots and automated gun turrets. Morning Glory is unconscious, being carried on P-21's back.

>Jumping through the next door I heard an ominous beep underhoof.
>I glanced down just in time to hit the override button on the mine with my magic. That sent prickles up and down my spine. I’d help nopony if I got us blown up.
"Mines" fall into the category of canonical world elements that Somber would have inherited from kkat, which kkat in turn would have ripped directly from the Fallout games, so I can't really lay this one at Somber's feet. However, I would still like to protest that these things make no fucking sense as practical weapons. What possible utility could there be in a mine that not only beeps a warning to its victim before exploding, but also gives them several seconds to get away? Not only that; it even has an override button. It's yet another example of something that works well enough as a game mechanic in an interactive medium, but does not transfer into a more realistic setting.

Anyway, fuck. BJ moves through the factory, past a couple more mines, and into some kind of main production area, where she is attacked by a floating robot. She destroys the robot, then takes Glory from P-21 and runs upstairs.

Upstairs, she finds a room with a fuckton of spent shell casings, and also some laboratory equipment. MG is too far gone to make the concoction herself, but she explains it to P-21, who gets to work. As he works, he and BJ have a brief, spirited argument over whether or not MG should be trusted. The short version is that P-21 is critical of Blackjack for trusting basically everyone they meet, whereas Blackjack is critical of P-21 for being suspicious of basically everyone they meet. We also learn that they are not technically friends yet, but are closer to being friends than they were the last time the subject came up. Glad we got that all sorted out.

Anywho, Dr. Dinglenut gets to work on the antidote, while Little Miss Psychopath heads out to shoot some more robots. She finds a room with a fuckton of ammunition in it, some of which is color-coded:

>Red proved to be some sort of incendiary that seemed rather futile. An orange shotgun shell, on the other hoof, exploded on contact like a grenade! Perhaps not as large a blast radius as the thrown variety, but still impressive! Green just splattered some sort of goo all over the metal. Then I fired a blue shell at a turret. There was an electric flash and then the turret just stopped. I looked skeptically at the disabled device and then at my gun. At first I’d been impressed. Then a minute later, the damn thing powered back up again, and I had to disable it the old-fashioned way: with buckshot. Black simply fired a bunch of tiny sharpened nails that bounced right off the armor of the few remaining sentries.
Great, just what this setting needed: more tiny details to keep track of. Looks like we now have to remember that there are five distinct types of color-coded specialty ammo, and they all do different things.

>I got to one door and immediately froze. I could feel the tingle in my skin even before I could hear the clicking of the PipBuck on my foreleg. Whatever was behind the locked door, I could live with the mystery.
The implication being that whatever is in there is radioactive? I guess? Anyway, whatever; I'll count this as a small improvement, simply because if this were Littlepip she would have spent another five mini-chapters hunting around for a key, only to end up having to fight some gigantic monster-thing in return for a locked box full of 200 year old Fig Newtons.

Anywho, BJ leaves the locked door alone and comes to the office of "Dr. Trottenheimer: Research Lead." If a dead NPC is mentioned by name, it's probably safe to assume he is important to the backstory of this particular area.

>Inside were a safe and terminal; I’d leave them to the more reliable hooves of P-21. A unicorn skeleton sat in the chair, an unusual pistol on the floor next to it.
At Hotel Edgequestria, all of our rooms come standard with a safe, a terminal, and at least one skeleton. If for some reason any of these items are missing from your room, please let the skeleton of the front desk concierge know, and we will happily provide you with a complimentary robo-turret and box of 200 year old Fig Newtons. Anyway, I'll again remark how refreshing I find it that this story's Wasteland-hero protagonist isn't also a master hacker and expert locksmith, and that the side characters are allowed to at least be useful for something. Small improvements that make a difference.

Oh, also: the weird gun she finds is called "Trottenheimer's Folly." The skeleton, who we can probably assume is the late Dr. Trottenheimer himself, appears to have shot himself with it. His skull is partially melted and the shot blew a large hole in the wall, so I'm also assuming his "folly" is some kind of ridiculously overpowered weapon that by all rights shouldn't exist.

Page break. BJ goes back downstairs and relieves P-21 from keeping an eye on MG as she recuperates. P-21 goes off to take a shit and/or open the safe upstairs. MG wakes up, and she and BJ yak for a bit.

>>375313

>“So. You said some things while you were out of it that made P-21 curious.”
>Instant evasive look. Not good. Worse, she looked upset. “I did?”
>“Something about ‘no more weapons’? I mean I just found it ironic given the nearest lab we found was a munitions laboratory, but P-21 was a little more curious,” I said softly, hoping to coax her into opening up a little.
I didn't highlight it, but this was in reference to a remark that MG made earlier, when she was still feverish from poison:

>She stirred and looked around in a daze, muttering softly, “No. I don’t want to do this anymore.” Her pupils were unfocused as she stared around. “No more weapons. Please…”
I had assumed she was just babbling because she thought they were still having the scorpion fight, but now it sounds like this is a flashback to something in her backstory.

She doesn't really want to talk about it, but BJ does manage to squeeze some vague information out of her. It seems the Enclave is similar to Stable 99 in that each pony has a job assigned to them. Unlike Stable 99, the assignments are handed out based on aptitude instead of heredity. MG's aptitude was in "technical engineering" and "medical procedures." It seems that they put her to work designing weapons or something, and she didn't enjoy the work, so she transferred to the Volunteer Corps at the first opportunity.

As a bonus, we also learn that apparently the first rule of the Enclave is that you don't talk about the Enclave:

>I gave a crooked smile. “You know, someday I’d really love to hear about life in the Enclave. Compare notes and all that?”
>“It’s… I can’t. Please… it’s not that I don’t want to,” she said softly as she stared at her hooves. “It’s that I can’t. If they ever found out I broke that protocol… I have family.” Her lavender eyes begged me to understand. “They’d be investigated. There’d be inquiries. My sister might lose her job. My father would certainly be disgraced. I can’t talk about it. Not about Thunderhead or what I did there. Nothing.” She covered her face with her hooves. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. I can’t,” she said as she gave a snotty sniff.
Alright then. Keep your secrets.

Anyway, BJ tells her that as long as she's just sitting around, she might as well whip up a few more batches of poison antidote in case they run into this problem again. Then, she goes off to take a shit and/or find P-21 and see what he's been up to.

She finds him upstairs in Dr. Trottenheimer's office, trying to brute-force the password on the terminal, because lawd knows it just wouldn't be Fallout: Equestria if anypony walked past a terminal without trying to see what was on it. He conveniently gets the password right at the precise moment she arrives, so he lets her read the journal entries while he roots around in the safe to see if there are any 200 year old Fig Newtons inside.

The journal, unsurprisingly, belongs to Dr. Trottenheimer. It is a tale of deception and intrigue, involving an organization called the MoM and a bunch of mystery players whose names are obnoxiously abbreviated to initials. Apparently, this Trottenheimer chap was transferred to Ironshod against his will from someplace called Horizon Labs, at the request of some mysterious director referred to as G.B., which I can only assume stands for Grumpy Buttocks.

Anyway, Grumpy Buttocks has Leon Trotsky working on some kind of mysterious new weapon, and it sounds like it's being done without the government's knowledge, or something. Eventually the government finds out, and P.P. sends the MoM to shut it down. I can only assume that P.P. stands for Prickly Pete, and MoM is the Ministry of Muffins. Prickly Pete interrogates ol' Trot McGrot, but he is too crafty by far, and escapes without having to reveal his secret recipe for potato salad.

Eventually, the city starts exploding for some reason, or a plague breaks out, or something. Scotty McTrotty has been contaminated by a mysterious substance he calls "the flux," which I can only assume is the same stuff that those capacitors are made from. The building goes on lockdown, and he finds himself trapped in his office, which sucks because he really has to go to the bathroom. He sits in there for a few hours, or maybe it's days or weeks, and then decides that since he can't leave his office without being shot by robot sentries, his only option is to just go in his wastebasket. Not wanting to soil a perfectly good wastebasket, and probably stink up the whole office in the process, he opts to kill himself instead.

He is currently in possession of something called the BGP, but only has one BBP for it. I can only assume that BGP stands for Big Green Potato, and BBP stands for Brown Butter Packet. This turns out to be enough ingredients to make just one batch of the super-secret potato salad that Grumpy Buttocks had hired him to invent. He whips it up, using the wastebasket that he is now really glad he didn't poop in. After all the fuss over the recipe, the potato salad turns out to be just awful, so awful in fact that he dies from eating it. In his last moments, he pens out a suicide note, entreating his family to please forgive him for being such a gigantic faggot, and also asking that if any random gun-toting lunatic should ever hack his terminal 200 years in the future and end up reading his suicide note, to please stop doing shit like that because it's an invasion of privacy. The end.

note: the above text may not be an accurate summary of this faggot's actual journal. You may want to read the actual entries for yourself in case any of this shit ends up being plot-critical.

Anyway, Blackjack pulls out the huge, ridiculous gun she found, and correctly deduces that over the course of 200 years, the Professor's batch of rancid potato salad has somehow fossilized into a gun. She decides to keep it to honor his memory. They also find some kind of mystery box in the safe, which turns out to be empty.

>>375316

Anyway, this basically the end of the chapter, but there's a bit more information that probably bears mention:

For some reason Morning Glory knows an awful lot about Hoofington, and pre-war Equestria in general. This seems due to her having grown up in the Enclave, which presumably has a better school system and better records of the pre-war world. She explains that Hoofington was originally a college town, but was leveled by ziggers early on in the war. It was rebuilt by the surviving residents, and converted into a major research and development hub for the Ministry of Wartime Whatever Technology; the one that Applejack was in charge of. And as I'm sure we all remember from the first story, the Ministry of Apple-Related Weapons of Mass Destruction came to Hoofington to do two things: create pony-made horrors beyond all comprehension, and whip up batches of disgusting potato salad. And now, thanks to Blackjack, they are all out of potato salad.

Anyway, I'm probably too tired to be doing this, so I'm going to stop now. The chapter basically ends here, and I think I've covered all the important stuff.

>Footnote: Level Up.
>New Perk: Shotgun Surgeon - When using shotguns, regardless of the type of ammunition used, you ignore an additional 10 points of a target’s damage threshold.

>>375188
>Why exactly is she so picky about what guns she uses? Seems to me like the beam guns are pretty effective.

Another poorly thought out gameplay mechanic awkwardly inserted into a story where it makes no sense, like pre-war security robots working after 200 years, and 5 clowns in a donut shop being a problem that took six fucking caravans over several months from the guys who hand out bounties and should have had this problem solved, and beam weapons having a random chance to "Critically Hit" triggering a special death animation like disintegration.

Like a fic someone mentioned in a youtube vid where Batman was written using Detective Vision to learn things, like seeing foes through walls and spotting important-looking objects highlighted orange, when Detective Vision was designed to gamify how Batman's experience lets him notice what the average player might not. Retard authors getting shit backwards again... yet they think they're improving on their inspirations and outsmarting the original works and fixing plot holes and inconsistencies when they pull shit like this, overcomplicating shit with messy solutions to simple problems with simple solutions.

Small Guns, Big Guns, Melee Weapons, and Energy Weapons are separate skills in Fallout, except in games where Small Guns and Big Guns are combined into the Guns skill. Agility improves your Gun skill and Perception improves your Energy Weapons skill which is retarded and makes no sense. A pro gunslinger shouldn't have trouble with what looks like a gun but bulkier and takes MicroFusion Cells instead of boolit. Logically energy weapons should suck to justify why anyone would use bullets, rare non-reuseable things of varying sizes, instead of standardized magic rechargeable batteries.

A smart author would recognize this and justify it with "Energy Weapons are weird pieces of shit designed by somepony who had literally never held a real gun before. They weigh a ton and lack iron sights and require frequent cleaning and can't be repaired by anyone except certified AppleCorp Geniuses and need precise distance based laser calibration so the laser drills holes instead of tickling bitches and the gun needs many AA batteries instead of one big clipazine mag, they're an ergonomics nightmare, and nobody uses them unless forced to by tradition or resource scarcity or armoured enemies" or just scrap the gameplay mechanic entirely and take the piss out of it when Blackjack shoots someone with a laser gun, Penis-69 or Morning Wood says "I didn't know you were trained to handle lasers", and Blackjack says "It's still a gun, point and shoot lmao".

>>375317

Chapter 6: Play

>Fallout Equestria: Bonfire of the Vanities
>By Robert Louis Stevenson
>Chapter 6: Call Me Ishmael

Today's fortune cookie:
>“I know lots of other ways to take care of you. Don't worry. You're gonna get better.”
t. Anthony Fauci, seconds before injecting Joe Biden with "the cure."

Their business at Ironshod now concluded, the trio moves on to the Fluttershy Medical Center. It has started raining again, and their progress is slow.

>I wasn’t going to discard a single bullet or bit of loot that might contribute to our ten-thousand-cap goal, though, and with P-21’s injured leg and Glory’s lack of pockets, I was left slogging through knee-deep mud while they trotted ahead.
Sticking with the formula of the original story, Somber's protagonist is overburdened with a bunch of basically worthless crap she refuses to toss aside.

>Ten thousand caps just to find out what EC-1101 was, and once we found out, what then?
Just out of curiosity, whatever happened to Morning Glory's suggestion of going to the Skyport to see if the Enclave will decode it for free? Hunting around for the Skyport can't be that much harder than trying to save up 10,000 caps by fighting 1,000 scorpions at 10 caps a pop, can it?

>Deus was still out there, somewhere. So was Sanguine, who directed him.
This actually seems like it would be the more pressing objective; however, since they have zero leads at the moment, there's not much they can do. However, since it sounds like the DJ is intent on keeping track of Blackjack's movements and broadcasting them over the radio, they could probably use that to lay a trap for Deus. Maybe do something big to get the DJ's attention, then set an ambush and hang out for a few days to see if Deus is indeed following them. Just food for thought.

Anyway, they keep on traipsing through the muddy landscape until eventually they get to the Fluttershy Medical Center. BJ sees a bunch of yellow bars on her PipBuck radar-thingie, and decides to announce their presence so they don't get accidentally shot.

They arrive at a barricade, where they are met by four armed ponies. The ponies seem well-mannered, and the quality of their weapons seems higher than what BJ is accustomed to seeing in the Wasteland. She explains that they are here about the squatter-removal contract, so they are brought into a tent and introduced to someone calling himself Prince Splendid.

> “Greetings. I am Prince Splendid.”
> You bet you are!
>“Sure. Refreshment sounds great.” Hot body, manners, and feeding us? This day just got a whole lot better! In fact, I was pretty sure that this was the high point of my entire experience in the Wasteland. Heck, of my life!
The twist to Blackjack's character vs. Littlepip seems to be that she likes dick.

>Refreshment involved chilled Sparkle-Cola RAD, which had a delicious sharp radish flavor – and more clicks on the radiation sensor – and some fresh carrots and apples.
I know it's just another of kkat's 1:1 game-element transpositions, but I've never quite understood what the deal is with the radiation in Sparkle-Cola. Is it radioactive because it's absorbed ambient radiation in the air, or because the soda was made intentionally radioactive by the manufacturer? And if the latter, then why? Seems like a rather silly and self-defeating marketing gimmick.

Anyway, they all sit and yak for a bit. Turns out that Prince Handsome and his associates are members of the Collegiate, which is a faction the Crusaders mentioned earlier. The Prince's father, who I guess is the head of the Collegiate or something, is dying, and they need access to the hospital's medical equipment. However, they can't access it because of what I can only assume is some kind of being of unfathomable horror that lurks inside. In true FoE style, rather than either taking direct action or proactively seeking help, the group has opted to simply set up camp in the parking lot and wait for someone to happen by who is willing to clear the building for them.

We are also given a brief explanation of what this guy's faction is about:

>“The Society members are the descendants of the aristocracy of Equestria. Our king and leaders are related to Princess Celestia, and thus we are the rightful inheritors of Equestria.” He gave a great sigh. “Sadly, few in the Wasteland will acknowledge our bloodline claims.”
He alternately refers to himself as part of The Collegiate and The Society. I recall the Crusaders specifically mentioning both, but I can't tell if they are meant to be two separate factions or not.

>“So you want access to the clinic. If I can convince these Collegiate ponies to let you in, would that be okay?” I asked, tapping hooves before me. Things were so much easier when I could just shoot ponies. If I lived, I won.
Oh, wait; I see what's going on. I misunderstood what the Prince was saying earlier. It looks like The Collegiate are the squatters that this guy wants removed. The Society is a separate faction that needs access to the hospital. The Collegiate is in there studying stuff, and won't let anyone else in. So, the Society is offering a bounty to anyone willing to oust the Collegiate, either violently or non-violently. Glad we got that all cleared up.

>I had to admit, I was impressed by what I saw; his ponies were better armed and equipped than most. He had fresh food; that was a miracle in and of itself. It was simply the fact that the Society seemed to believe it had some inherent right to rule. Even if he got this super cure for his father, who would it help besides ponies who already had so much?
As usual, the inter-factional politics in this setting are difficult to follow, and don't make a whole lot of sense even after you understand what's going on. If this group believes themselves to be the rightful rulers of Equestria, and also have access to fresh food and better guns than everyone else, why not just take everything over by force? Seems like they have a decent advantage.

>>375346

The issue here is similar to what we saw earlier, with the Finders and the highway raiders. The Society is better armed and presumably better organized than Blackjack's band, so why don't they just go in and clear out the Collegiate themselves? I guess we don't know much about the Collegiate yet; maybe they're tougher than they sound. Either way, though, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to just camp here and wait.

If Prince Splendid's father really is dying, then it seems like time would be a factor. Even if they don't have enough muscle to take on the Collegiate themselves, wouldn't it make more sense to hunt around and see if they can rustle up a mercenary army or something? Be proactive? Go to the Megamart, talk to some ponies, see if they can't just hire a few extra soldiers? I mean, if your father is on his deathbed, and the only thing standing between you and a miracle cure is a group of nerds who took over an abandoned hospital and won't let you in, it seems like the sensible course of action would be to round up as many goons as you can find, and take the hospital by any means necessary.

Again, it's a logical catch-22 similar to the Finders' situation with the raiders. If this is is a problem that's too big for this well-armed, well-provisioned faction to solve, I can't see how farming the job out to some lone mare armed with a collection of shitty handguns is going to help. Conversely, if this is a problem small enough that BJ and her friends can handle it at their current level, and the situation is a matter of life and death for the Society, why would the Society not just take care of it themselves instead of going to all the bother of creating the contract? No matter how I slice it up, it just doesn't make any sense.

>We stepped back out into the rain with our stomachs fed, but my head, already struggling with earlier doubts and questions, now throbbed. Plus, it didn’t help that my loins were very interested in Splendid, and I had no clue how to address that; in 99 I’d put myself on his breeding queue. No doubt Splendid would have had a backlog of years. Now, I doubted it was just as simple as getting him alone and lifting my tail.
Blackjack's priorities make about as much sense as everything else currently happening.

>“So, what do you think?” I asked P-21, and then frowned as I saw him staring out into space as he limped along beside me. “Yoo-hoo… Equestria to P-21…” I swished my tail through his field of vision.
>He blinked out of his reverie, looking… embarrassed? “Yeah? What? Oh, think? I think… ah...” I stared in fascination as he actually stammered! “I… I’ll leave it up to you.” Rarely have such ominous words been uttered by so level-headed a pony. I didn’t think he could stammer!
>“What’s gotten into you?” I asked, and grinned as he went even redder.
>“Nothing. I mean… I’m just thinking about what he said to you…” He scowled and then clenched his eyes closed. “Never mind!” he said as he limped ahead of us.
inb4 P-21 turns out to be gay for Prince Splendid or something. Either that or he has the hots for Blackjack. Considering the way these stories usually play out, I'm betting on the former.

Anyway, BJ & Co. head up to the hospital entrance, which has been fortified with sandbags. The ponies inside are also showing up as friendlies on her radar, so she uses the same approach as with the Society. They are greeted by some nerdy-looking horse who demands to know if they are with The Society:

>“Are you with the Society?” he asked at once and then blurted nervously, “Tell them we’re not leaving!” Their beam rifles looked like they’d fall apart with a sharp kick. Those turrets on the other hand…
Again: this group doesn't look like anything the Society couldn't handle on its own.

Anyway, BJ introduces herself as "Security," and as expected her "reputation" precedes her. The nerd introduces himself as Archie, and invites her inside.

>A strange drum hummed softly in the corner, providing power to a number of flickering terminals.
Wait a minute. If these guys need a portable generator to make the terminals in here work, what exactly has been powering the terminals we've encountered so far? This is yet another squishy inconsistency of this setting. Since it's Pastel Ponyland, you could probably just brush this off by saying that the terminals run on magic, not electricity, but if that's the case...why do these guys need a generator? Another logical catch-22. This is why pre-writing matters: stuff like this should be thought out in advance, before you even start building the story.

>“So are you the pony in charge?” I asked.
>The brown buck with the scraggly black mane nodded. “For now. My boss went upstairs a week ago and hasn’t come back,” he said nervously as he looked at the three of us. “Prince Splendid’s tried to take over more than once. First he tried to sweet talk us, then bribes, then he attacked.”
Somehow, this entire situation makes less sense the more it's explained. Also, I will once again protest that "buck" is an inappropriate slang term for a male horse though I will also acknowledge that it's another legacy term inherited from kkat's world, and thus is not Somber's fault directly.

Anyway, fuck. Here's a quick summary of the situation: the Collegiate came to this hospital for some yet-unknown purpose; research or something. The Society arrived a short time later, hoping to score some free medical equipment, but the Collegiate was already here and wouldn't let them in. It sounds like the Society tried and failed to force their way in, so they put out this silly contract instead. Meanwhile, the Collegiate wants to explore the upstairs but can't for some reason, probably because it's haunted by some being of unfathomable horror. So, much like the Society, they decided to just camp out indefinitely and sit around playing with each other's balls, hoping that some do-gooder would wander in eventually and solve their problems for them.

>>375348

Anyway, the conversation is predictable from here. The Collegiate and the Society both want whatever the hell is stored on the upper floors of this building, so BJ figures the obvious solution is for her to go up there, defeat whatever monster ate the previous expedition, and retrieve the medical stuff. Both sides get what they want, nobody has to get killed except for all the ponies who have been killed already, of course, and BJ gets some more caps to add to her file-decryption budget. Everypony wins. Of course, the really obvious solution would have been for the Collegiate and the Society to just agree to a cease-fire, combine forces, and explore the upstairs together, taking out whatever is up there using their combined numbers and the superior weaponry of the Society. However, this is Fallout: Equestria, where no one but the protagonist is allowed to take any significant action, so that idea would naturally be a non-starter.

>Damn, my mane was itching like crazy.
She's mentioned her mane itching several times now. I can't tell if it's meant to be a figure of speech, like "my ears are burning," or if something is being foreshadowed. Maybe she just has lice or something. I guess we'll just have to wait and find out.

Anywho, the trio sallies forth. They leave the base-camp area in the emergency room, and enter a large central atrium that was designed to look like an artificial forest. The visual imagery in this area is admittedly pretty cool:

>The interior of the massive structure was hollow, and far above us the domed skylight had shattered, allowing rain and runoff to cascade down into the fountain set in the center of the chamber. Chipped and faded concrete vines coiled up the interior, giving the impression of being within some mythical wood. Butterflies and birds perched, frozen and forgotten for two centuries. Glass tubes had once held elegant brass elevators, but now they were smashed or leaned out over the interior.

There is also a statue of a pegasus pony in the center of the room. BJ asks Glory if she knows anything about it:

>“Who was she?” I asked Glory softly, feeling a strange sense of reverence and sadness.
>“Fluttershy. She was a ministry mare, and a friend of Rainbow Dash. She founded the Ministry of Peace and dedicated herself to helping the ponies of Equestria throughout the war.” Morning Glory looked wistful as well as she looked up at her. “As the war progressed it took its toll on her. Some claim she aided the enemy, despite orders to the contrary, and gave zebras medical supplies and other care. At the end... well… I was taught she went mad with grief and wandered out into the Wasteland to die. She simply couldn’t live with having failed Equestria.”
Here, we see yet another of Somber's small improvements to kkat's original formula. BJ, having been raised in a Stable, has only limited knowledge of the pre-war world, and as such cannot immediately identify many of the key players. Morning Glory, who grew up in the Enclave and had a better education, would plausibly know a lot more, so BJ is frequently asking her questions like this. This serves the dual purpose of conveying essential information to the reader without spoonfeeding it through narration, while also delineating roles for these two characters. BJ plays essentially the same role in her story as Littlepip played in the original, but unlike LP, BJ isn't inexplicably all-knowing or all powerful. The side characters actually serve a purpose, and are capable of filling in gaps in the protagonists knowledge, or picking up the slack when there's a task she can't perform.

>Morning Glory, however, examined the remaining elevator curiously. “Something wrong?”
>“I think it’s still functional. It just needs a spark battery and some scrap metal,” she said as she pried up a panel in the center of the platform.
Also, while Morning Glory was clearly designed to be this story's Velvet Remedy, ie a quiet, meek, Fluttershy-type who hates guns and violence, she's also a more well-rounded character than Velvet was. She doesn't contribute much in the way of muscle or firepower, but she's resourceful and has technical knowledge that comes in handy. We can once again make a favorable comparison between this story and it's predecessor: at one point in FoE, the party encounters a broken elevator. Littlepip simply repairs it herself, without any explanation of how or why she would have any idea how to do that, since all she knows is PipBuck repair. In a similar situation in this story, the problem is handled by Morning Glory. It's been established that Glory has a background in mechanical engineering and medicine, so it's plausible she might have enough general working knowledge of machines to get a broken elevator working.

While this story is still clearly following the trajectory of the original, with the narrator-heroine being groomed for a future as some kind of all-powerful badass, the rest of the party is at least more balanced than in the original. We can probably compare the current Blackjack-Morning Glory-P-21 trio to the Littlepip-Velvet-Calamity trio that formed the core group in the first story, and again, it's a favorable comparison. FoE was basically the Littlepoop Show, with Calamity playing the role of Littlepoop's sidekick, and Velvet relegated to an occasional healer role. Conversely, P-21 and Glory have both proven themselves capable in their own right, and they each contribute something actually useful to the group. I don't doubt that, as the protagonist levels up and has more and more wacky powers grafted onto her, that PH will turn into the Blackjack Show eventually too, but at least the side characters get to actually do something in this story.

Anyway, fuck. Morning Glory uses a spark battery and some spare parts that BJ found in the previous location to fix the elevator, and they ride it to the fifteenth floor, which I guess is where all the action is.

>>375354

This next bit is a little confusing, so please bear with me.

>When the doors to the fifteenth floor opened I jumped through, breathing hard as I fought the urge to be sick. When my heartbeat slowed I looked back at the elevator where P-21 and Morning Glory were frozen in place. “What?” I asked as they stared at me… no. Not at me. Slowly I turned and looked at the wall opposite the elevator. In flaking black-maroon letters, a single word was written as if with a paintbrush. ‘PLAY’.
>Oh horseapples…
I have no idea what the significance of the word 'PLAY' is supposed to be.

The scene ends in a page break, and unfortunately things aren't any clearer after the fade-in:

>Time had stopped as effectively as if I’d triggered S.A.T.S. and simply left it there. My PipBuck’s chronometer might’ve still marked the time, but every minute felt like an hour. Normally I’d be bored to stupidity, but here my every nerve was screaming at attention. Step by cautious step we walked together, me first, then P-21, and lastly Glory watching behind us. The word was painted every few feet, sometimes in elegant cursive and sometimes in wild, broad letters. The lights flickered and dimmed, but I was used to dim and uncertain light. I was not used to the soft, chiming melody that played all around us like an invisible music box with a cylinder that turned just a touch too slowly.
Is this area...dangerous somehow? I mean, I was basically assuming there would be something dangerous up here, but I have no idea why they're treading so cautiously. Does the word 'play' have some significance in this world that was covered earlier, and I've just forgotten about it? Other than it being the title of this particular chapter, I can't think of anything. I think it's just supposed to be creepy, like "come play with us," or something.

Anyway, whatever; I guess I just have to keep reading and find out. They explore this eerily quiet area, which appears to be a former children's ward or something. The atmosphere is generically spooky, but nothing much is happening:

>There were other little variances. Dolls hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the hallway. A stuffed rabbit tucked into a hospital bed… no, not tucked. Strapped. Two dozen bed sheets stretched across the hallway, decorated with maroon houses and stick figures. And more detailed paintings of ponies. And… fire. And ponies fighting. Ponies dismembered.
>“What the hay is going on here?” I muttered softly. I suddenly found myself longing for Pony Joe’s. “Give me bodies… or something shooting at me… or something. Not freaky pictures and words written in dark paint.” I glanced back and saw both of them staring at me. “What?”
>Glory swallowed. “That isn’t paint, Blackjack.” She pointed at the black-red letters on the wall.
My best guess at this point is...more raiders? Either that, or Fluttershy went through a weird installation-art phase before she went crazy and skipped out.

Anyway, they keep walking, and vaguely creepy haunted-house-type stuff keeps happening. A severed head rolls out at them, and a foal giggles from somewhere off down the hall. An automated maintenance robot rolls by and cleans up the blood, but leaves the head. Nothing else happens, though. Also there is some kind of spooky music-box music playing over the loudspeakers. The same song comes through on BJ's PipBuck radio when she turns it on.

They arrive at the nurse's station, which appears to be in more or less pristine condition. This isn't that hard to believe, since according to the Collegiate ponies downstairs this area was hermetically sealed when the bombs went off, and would have opened up only recently. However, for some reason, BJ finds it unsettling, or something. I have to say, while I appreciate Somber's effort to create a...well...somber...atmosphere, so far this scene is more confusing than creepy. There's plenty of generically-spooky tension, but...I honestly don't know what I'm supposed to be worrying about.

>I knew that head didn’t come from nowhere though.
So far, the most terrifying thing in here is Somber's grammar.

Anywho, they find a terminal, and P-21 cracks the password. However, the screen suddenly flashes the words "Peek-a-boo, I see you," and then it just starts screaming at them. Rude. BJ uses one of her new exploding orange color-coded rounds to blow it up, which to be fair is also pretty rude. The creepy music resumes, and they keep walking. Oh, also, BJ's EFS is behaving weirdly; it seems that something is jamming the signal.

>We came across a door with something new carved in the wood paneling. ‘Ollie Ollie Oxen Free’. I carefully opened it telekinetically, revealing a desiccated corpse rolled in a fetal position in the tiny space at the bottom of the linen closet. She wore a nurse’s uniform. Scratched in the wood before the body was a simple eulogy: ‘I don’t want to play anymore.’
A sobering testimony from yet another victim of video-game addiction.

Anyway, it just keeps going on and on like this. The desiccated nurse has some kind of magic keycard on her that opens magic locks, so they take that. They keep exploring, and see some more creepy shit. They find the body of one of the Collegiate-guys at one point, skinned and with a bunch of used syringes jabbed into him like a porcupine. Rude.

>We encountered a box in the hall, a large metal cube with small pink hearts painted on each side. I couldn’t explain why, but I had the strangest fondness for the box.
Hurr durr references.

Also, the meme-cube turns out to be a jack-in-the-box with a dead pony inside, which itself turns out to be a bomb disguised as a different bomb. The whole thing is like some kind of edgy meme inception; clearly installation-art-phase Fluttershy had a little too much time on her hooves.

And the fun is far from over, kids; Somber just churns out pages and pages of this shit. We've still got a lot of edge left to slog through. Lucky us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-p6EiglULA

>>375355

>Things didn’t improve as we encountered more bodies. A tea party of four bony ponies around a petrified cake with their hooves nailed to the table and party hats on their heads. A body dressed in a foal’s tutu impaled on a turntable.
Seriously, it just keeps going on and on like this.

Anyway, the party keeps on exploring. Everywhere they go, they encounter these weird tableaus with the corpses, but other than that the area appears uninhabited and strangely clean and well-maintained.

>I used the bits we had to clean out the soda machines, sharing two of the fizzy drinks with Glory and P-21.
Uh...why? Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the whole point of these contract-missions to save up money so you can afford file decryption services? Obviously you're going to have to spend a little on ammunition and supplies, but...radioactive soda? How is that a necessary expenditure? And why would you buy so much of it when you're overburdened as it is?

Well, I think I may actually have an answer. It's subtle, and I didn't notice it the first time I read the above sentence, but BJ specifically says bits, not caps. Caps, as in bottle caps, are, for reasons I will never understand but that probably make as much sense as anything else in this wacky setting, the primary form of currency in the Wasteland. However, it was established early on that Stable 99 still uses the traditional Equestrian bit. So, it's probably safe to assume that BJ is still carrying around some of her old money, which wouldn't be worth anything out here.

Most likely, the author's reasoning is that BJ would want to effectively "exchange" her old Stablecoins ba dum tss for bottle caps. The easiest way to do this would be to use them in vending machines to buy old bottles of soda, and save the caps. And, since you're spending the bit either way, you might as well enjoy the soda.

It basically makes sense, so long as you ignore obvious questions like "why the fuck are bottle caps being used as currency when gold coins obviously still exist?" However, if you're going to have your characters take strange actions like this, where their reasons won't necessarily be clear, you want to make sure you're explaining it to the reader. Any FoE fan who is deeply-invested enough in this setting to understand the difference between bits and caps would probably see what the author meant here without needing it explained. However, the average person would just read this and ask: "if the party is overburdened with junk as it is, and the whole point of this expedition was to earn money, then why the fuck are they wasting all their money buying soda?" Even if it's a safe bet that most of your readers will probably be fans of the original FoE, it's still important to make sure that all essential information is present in your story so that any reader can follow it. That's just my two cents. Or bits. Or caps.

Aaaaaanyyywaaaaaayyy, they come across an old newspaper clipping that provides a hint at what might have been going on here. It appears that the Ministry of Peace, which was headed by Fluttershy, was investing in some kind of "preservation" technology. It sounds like it's basically cryogenics: ponies who are too sick or injured to be properly treated can elect to have themselves frozen in carbonite until a cure is found. This probably explains all of the frozen birds and butterflies and whatnot they've been seeing around here. Presumably, this is also what the Society came here to find.

>“Blackjack,” Morning Glory said softly. I glanced at her, and followed her gaze into the top corner of the room where a carved white bunny watched us sternly. There was the tiniest little hum, and I watched a camera in one eye of the bunny slowly focus.
Here is my best guess about what is probably going on: Fluttershy developed this "preservation" system as a way to help critically-injured ponies and/or critters survive the war, hopefully to be awakened at some point in the future when both they and the world could be healed. Since she would have no way of guaranteeing that there would be ponies alive to oversee the system while the patients were frozen, she developed some kind of sentient, compassionate AI to watch over and care for them. This system probably malfunctioned and/or went insane from loneliness at some point, and now it's a Harlan-Ellison-esque psychotic murder machine bent on "playing" with anyone or anything unfortunate enough to wander into its domain. Screencap it; we'll see if I'm right.

Anywho, as soon as they leave the staff-lounge area where they found the article, the doors auto-lock behind them and they are trapped in a hallway with some kind of automated beam-turret. However, instead of just slaughtering them outright, the turret fires on them at intervals, following a pattern of alternating red and green lights that is too complicated to explain in detail. It soon becomes apparent that someone or something is playing a game with them, which seems to lend credence to my above theory.

>This red light I could feel the soft tickle of a breath on my hindquarters.
This sentence is bad and you should feel bad.

Anyway, yada yada yada, they make it through the murder-hallway, but unfortunately a door suddenly closes, separating Morning Glory from the others and trapping her in the hallway. She was lagging behind a bit due to being grazed on the leg by one of the beams. The scene ends in a page break.

>I’d killed Scoodle through ignorance. Now I’d killed Glory through incompetence. How could I have gone through the door without making sure she’d been through first? I’d seen her get hit by the beam. I should have known she’d be a few steps slower. I’d sunk down with my back against the door, knocking my head against it with the shotgun cradled in my hooves.
I can't tell if Morning Glory is actually kill, or if this is a fakeout. I'm going to withhold my 'F' until I have a clearer picture of what's going on.

>>375378
>Screencap it; we'll see if I'm right.
Done. Good catch on the bits vs. caps distinction, I missed that as I read along. Tough I suppose "read along" is a bit generous. The prose, specifically Blackjack's inane inner monologue, makes my eyes glaze over after a few paragraphs and I find myself skimming through the chapters before long.

For what it's worth, Bottlecaps are currency in Fallout because it's backed by something necessary: Water.

Merchants in The Hub in Fallout 1 would trade a Bottlecap for a glass of water. Nuked America needed a new currency because hyperinflated Weimarica dollars are intrinsically worthless, and over here, it was Caps.

In Fallout 2, caps are being replaced with newly minted NCR dollars. There's even a quest where you hunt for some treasure and tragically, the reward is caps, not anything valuable in current year. Fallout Tactics used Ring Pulls and Brotherhood Scrip because it would be absurd for everyone across all of America to be using the exact same improvised currency 60-200 years after nukes dropped.

Bugthesda understands none of the reasoning behind marketable Fallout iconography, so bottlecaps are currency across all of America, even in the DC area 200 years after the nukes fell for the same reason people still scavenge perfectly preserved pre-war food from the local Super Duper Mart. Within 10 years of The Hub's founding in California, Bottlecaps became the economy of the entire American Wasteland basically forever, because that's how that works.

Is there anything in Edgequestria, PH or otherwise, explicitly stated to back bottlecaps as a currency and has enough influence to make it the standard currency of trade across the continent?

>>375378

Blackjack and P-21 are on the other side of the murder-hall, safe and sound but unfortunately now one friend short of a birthday party. Blackjack is understandably upset, and asks P-21 if she could take him up on his offer to murder her the next time she did something stupid. However, P-21 declines, partly on the grounds that Glory's still unconfirmed death was the murder hall's fault, not BJ's, and partly on the grounds that he doesn't want to finish the quest by himself. Probably smart, since she's the one carrying all the guns and ammo.

Anyway, yada yada yada, they both decide they are going to pull through and persevere. What's more, Blackjack has an idea: since P-21 knows about terminals and stuff, and is also adept at sneaking, it might be a good idea for them to split up inb4 Scooby Doo. She will run around triggering booby traps and drawing their adversary's attention, while P-21 sneaks around with the keycard, trying to find whoever or whatever is lurking in the control room. It's probably as good an idea as any.

So, they proceed to do that thing I said. P-21 slips away, while BJ stomps around, loudly singing an edgy version of "Do The Pony Pokey" while blasting bunny-cameras with her shotgun. This feels like kind of a waste of ammunition, but whatever; from what I understand she's got plenty of it, and she's trying to create a distraction.

>I froze in the hallway, and the music cut off as if with a knife. The foal stood there in a strange pink dress. Her lavender hide sported a massive scar running up her side and disappearing into her pink mane that fell across her eyes. Her mouth was sewn in a grotesque grin as she stood before me in a doorway.
Not sure if final boss or yet another corpse-tableau...

...and as it turns out, neither is Blackjack. She hesitates, looking at the creepy filly. The creepy filly starts saying creepy-filly things like "do you like my costume" and "be sure to drink your Ovaltine," and then yada yada yada it turns out she's a robot. What a tweest. BJ blasts it with the shotgun, then runs off. The scene ends in a page break.

We rejoin BJ a short time later. She has moved up another floor, but it's basically just more of the same. The lights flicker spoopily on and off, spoopy music plays, and there are spoopy killbots wandering around everywhere.

She comes to a room that has an open safe and a cracked terminal, which she (rather presumptuously) assumes to be P-21's work. Inside, she finds some healing potions and coins and ammunition and whatever.

>The specialty shells had one downside I hadn’t realized: they wore down my weapon like mad. I really didn’t want to try and fire it again if I could help it. Not without some significant repairs.
Reasonable limitations on weapons? In my Fallout Equestria spinoff? It's more likely than you think. small improvements

Naturally, being trapped in a creepy abandoned hospital surrounded by rampaging killbots does not stop BJ from snooping around a little. She finds a medical form for someone named Marigold, as well as a photo of a blue unicorn standing next to some kind of experimental missile that looks like it could be important. The cracked terminal has a sound file on it naturally, so she decides to give that a listen as well.

The speaker is never identified, but appears to be a member of a party that explored this hospital sometime after the war. If I had to take a guess I'd say it's probably someone from the Collegiate expedition.

Anyway, the unknown speaker describes entering the hospital and finding everything quiet and deserted. They come across the "preservation" area with the stasis pods, which apparently are still functioning and still have some living ponies inside. However, the speaker is uninterested in them and leaves them alone.

His party eventually finds the maneframe, which is apparently what they were looking for. He notes that, at some point in the past, the machine appears to have been intentionally damaged so that it can't be switched on, but his team thinks they can repair it. However, once the repairs are completed, ominous things begin happening. It's pretty much the same stuff we've been seeing: creepy music always playing, toys left out in weird places, Ovaltine not being properly imbibed, etc. Eventually, the team members start getting killed off, the guy keeps finding their bodies posed in weird ways, and you can probably guess at the rest. So far, all of this seems to be leaning towards something along the lines of what I theorized earlier: the maneframe contains some hostile sentient AI that controls the hospital, and waking it up is how all the murders happened.

Anyway, BJ loads up her gun, runs out into the hallway, screams "SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIENDS," and starts capping robots left and right.

>“Bad pony,” a deep voice said from the doorway. I turned and looked at a huge heavy robot draped in slabs of meat. “Time out,” it said firmly as, with shocking deftness, it flung a glowing white ball of glass at me. A grenade or… something. I reached out with my magic to swat it back at the machine and…
This is actually a rather clever twist, at least it might be for anyone familiar with the first story. Remember that time Littlepoop used that cheap-shit trick to kill an alicorn that logically should have mopped the floor with her? No, not the boxcar. I'm talking about that time she lobbed a memory orb at one of them, tricking it into catching and triggering the orb, thus rendering it defenseless. Anyone remember? Well, Pepperidge Farm remembers. And apparently so does Somber, because he just had some robot use the same trick on his protagonist.

I remember commenting that it was a silly trick, that shouldn't work on anything that's lived in the Wasteland long enough to know what a Memory Orb is, which ought to include alicorns. However, in reverse it makes sense: BJ has no idea what this thing is or what it does.

>>375380
>Is there anything in Edgequestria, PH or otherwise, explicitly stated to back bottlecaps as a currency and has enough influence to make it the standard currency of trade across the continent?
No, and that's a big part of why I've always found it so ridiculous.

In the context of everything you explained, it all makes a little more sense. In fact, I actually remember this subject coming up during discussion of the first story, and I remember thinking that using bottled water as currency would make more sense than using bottle caps. Bottle caps used as tokens representing a quantity of water, the same way a reserve note originally represented a quantity of gold, makes sense, assuming the tokens were issued by whoever was holding on to the water. Just using the caps arbitrarily as tokens does not, nor does the idea that caps would be universally recognized everywhere as currency.

It sounds like this is basically another legacy issue inherited from kkat's setting. The consensus from the previous threads was that almost the entire setting of FoE was directly ripped off 1:1 from the games, with the vast majority of it being taken from Fallout 3. It also sounds like Fallout 3 was the most poorly thought-out game in the series, with the developers not really understanding the setting or the lore all that well.

So basically, the issue is that, while the original titles seem to have put quite a bit of thought into how trade and currency would work in the post-apocalyptic world, the third game decided to just take the idea of "bottlecaps r money lol" and run with it. Kkat, also an uncreative person, who I doubt understands much about economics in the first place, just took the same idea and transposed it directly into his world, because "Fallout 3 nostalgia lol".

The problem with all of this is that Edgequestria using bottlecaps as currency makes zero sense on its own. It's a part of a recurring problem in this series: the original creator, kkat, just wanted to make "Fallout with ponies," but didn't put much effort into building a convincing setting that could stand on its own. Many of the world's elements, of which the bottlecaps are just one example, are just 1:1 ripoffs of memes and tropes from the series, that would be recognized as such by fans but would confuse anyone else. The problem is compounded by kkat's use of Fallout 3 as his primary source material, since it sounds as though, ironically enough, the devs there did something similar: they directly transposed elements from the earlier games into their setting, without paying much attention to how or why any of it was in there.

The downside of all of this is that, since kkat wrote the original story, anyone wanting to write stories set in the FoE universe has to follow his rules, including the ones that don't make any goddamn sense. The bottlecap thing can probably just be filed away under "legacy issues from kkat," but since I don't get the impression Somber has put much thought into it either, I'll err on the side of caution and say that he is guilty of some faggotry here as well.

>>375379
>The prose, specifically Blackjack's inane inner monologue, makes my eyes glaze over after a few paragraphs and I find myself skimming through the chapters before long
Unfortunately the prose-quality in this story is quite poor. I haven't commented on it much, because at this point my expectations for these fanfics are low.

It's not quite as bad as in some of the others: Our Girl Scootaloo was atrocious to read for a number of reasons, and I remember The Sun and the Rose having pretty terrible prose as well. I feel like the quality here in terms of mechanics, style, etc. is probably on par with the original Fallout: Equestria. If you scratched Somber's name off of this and told me that kkat had written it as a sequel or something, I don't think I'd have much trouble believing it. Mostly I would be impressed at all the improvements made to the original formula.

>>375381

Anywho, BJ is now trapped in a memory orb.

The memory belongs to someone named "Dr. Redheart," who is lying on a couch in the office where BJ was earlier. This is clearly an old memory, dating from around the time of the war. She and a mare named Garnet are discussing an upcoming visit, or inspection, or something, that Fluttershy intends to conduct at the hospital. Apparently another employee, whose name is Cheerilee, has some reservations about one of the projects they are all working on.

At this point, an aging Cheerilee enters the room. She and Redheart seem to dislike each other, but BJ (watching through through Redheart's eyes) believes that at one time they used to be friends. They talk shop for a little bit, and then another mare enters, whom BJ recognizes as Fluttershy from the statue she saw.

Cheerilee has some reservations about the stasis-pod project. Apparently, anyone inside it remains conscious, or partially-conscious, or something, and she thinks it's cruel to subject children to this, which is probably a fair point. However, Fluttershy counters that it's better than letting them all get killed, which is probably also a fair point.

>“Tell me that I should let children die and I will stop the use of the pods right now and start long-term testing. A year at least,” Fluttershy said in that soft, reasonable voice. A pony would need a heart of stone to say those words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg

Anyway, Cheerilee accidentally makes a remark about Fluttershy's barren, empty womb, which turns out to be a touchy subject for ol' Flutters. It all pretty much goes south from here. An obviously offended Fluttershy excuses herself and leaves, with the implication being that Cheerilee's concerns are to be ignored. Cheerilee laments her faux pas, but still has reservations about the project.

>“Don’t worry, Cheerilee. It’s not as if the children will be left alone. They’ll have constant interaction with the staff, me, family, and teachers. They won’t be neglected,” Redheart assured her. “Most of the time they won’t even be awake. We can keep them sedated and dreaming sweet dreams until they can be woken up. Beautiful dreamers.”
I'm actually a little confused about how all of this is supposed to work. Are the children conscious? Semi-conscious? In a coma? Because it makes a difference. Being trapped, immobile and fully conscious, in a stasis pod for 200 years would probably be enough to drive nearly anyone insane. Being in some kind of coma or dream-state for that long would be a different matter. Being asleep and unconscious, as in no dreams at all, would probably be the best scenario there, although I assume the kids might have some future-shock issues when they wake up.

Anyway, this is basically the end of the memory, although there are a couple more passages that seem relevant and worth highlighting:

>Garnet nodded. “I can appreciate her concern. I’m glad she hasn’t found the report of the subjects developing resistances to the sedative over time. Certainly twenty years is a long time, though. It’s not as if we’ll keep them in stasis for centuries.”
So...after 20 years the sedative wears off and they wake up? Since it's clear that a lot more time has passed since this memory was recorded, this detail seems relevant. Are the children still paralyzed, or...what? Are they conscious but still in stasis? Dead? I think I'm starting to get an idea of where all of this might be going, but it would help if the author could clarify a few of the details.

>“She was right about there being some confusion regarding the spells involved, though. Some of the nursing staff is concerned. There was a memo about spells from the Ministry of Image being involved, but that couldn’t be right.”
This, too, could be significant. It was established earlier in the conversation that the Ministry of Image is responsible for putting out propaganda. If the implication here is that the Ministry is using spells to implant dreams or suggestions in the coma-patients' minds, this could be significant. Again, though, I'm just speculating; I'm not sure what exactly the author is trying to say.

Anyway, the memory ends and Blackjack wakes up:

>I returned to my body, screaming as fire roared from crotch to ribcage. I lay on my back, strapped to an operating table, pulling against the restraints on my limbs. Overhead, a robotic spider on a white boom hovered over my body. Little scissors were slowly snipping open my belly as I screamed and thrashed against the restraints. “You fuckers!” I hissed through clenched jaws as spit ran down my chin.
Well, this seems like a bit of a sticky situation. On the other hand, though, putting a character into a James Bond type situation like this, as opposed to just killing her while she was unconscious, usually bodes well for said character's chances of escape. It's good to be the protagonist.

And now, it's time for the big reveal:

>All around the perimeter of the room were metal pods with observation windows and padded interiors; at least forty was the best count I could make under the circumstances. In the pods were foals. Some were missing legs and eyes. Others appeared burned or worse. Others appeared intact, so I could only guess they suffered from some internal disease or condition. They all lay so still they might as well have been corpses. Each had a tiny monitor with zigzagging lines on it that was too far beyond my intelligence level to understand. The cables all ran to a central drum decorated with a dozen terminals. Running from this drum was a thick cable that disappeared into the floor. Blackened marks showed where the hoof-thick connection had been mended.
So, it looks like my prediction was close, but not quite on the money. I was correct in that the maneframe-system is indeed responsible for all the spooky shit going on; however, what I missed is that the system itself is being psychically controlled by the children in the stasis pods. I think.

>>375384

Alright, this whole thing is a little goofy, so I'm going to have to ask you all to bear with me as I try to explain it. This feels like one of those situations where the author has an idea maybe 85-90% worked out, but some crucial details are just not quite there yet. Then he says to himself: "fuck it, I'm just going to write it anyway and hope that nobody thinks too hard about it."

With that in mind, as far as I can tell, here is what happened:

As we already know, about 200 years ago, Fluttershy cooked up some kind of wacky technology that allowed her to take sick ponies and hold them in stasis until they could be cured. However, it's not quite the cryogenic-pod scenario I had initially imagined.

The pods seem to basically freeze time for whoever is inside. They can't move, they won't age, and any degenerative disease they have will not progress. I'm not clear on whether or not they feel physical pain in there; I'm assuming probably no, since that would be several orders of magnitude more cruel than just letting the patient die. Then again, this is FoE we're talking about, so I can't be sure.

The more crucial issue is that the stasis spell, or whatever it is exactly, does not affect the mind. Even though the pod-pony will essentially be frozen in time, unable to move or take any action, they will remain fully conscious and aware of their situation. It sounds like they are not able to naturally fall asleep, either.

If you think this sounds like a bad idea for a spell, you're absolutely right. This is a spell that solves a problem, but in the process creates a second problem that is as bad or worse than the first problem. Imagine a spell that protects you from shitting your pants by teleporting the shit into a complete stranger's pants; that's basically the level of retarded spell design we're dealing with here. Maybe there's some technical magic-related reason for why the stasis spell would have to work this way, and maybe you'd need Twilight Sparkle-level autism to understand or explain it. However, even if that's the case, you would have to be either a sadist or an absolute retard to even approve this for testing.

Well, as it turns out, Fluttershy was either a sadist or an absolute retard, and so was basically everyone who worked for her. She not only approved this, but rushed it through testing so it could be put to clinical use on children, and apparently no one except Cheerilee ever bothered to raise an objection.

This next part is where it starts to get a little murky and weird. We learned from the memory orb that there was a second spell, or a drug or something, that sedated the patient during stasis. However, what's odd is that it seems to be only a partial sedation. Here is exactly what Redheart has to say about it:

>“Don’t worry, Cheerilee. It’s not as if the children will be left alone. They’ll have constant interaction with the staff, me, family, and teachers. They won’t be neglected,” Redheart assured her. “Most of the time they won’t even be awake. We can keep them sedated and dreaming sweet dreams until they can be woken up. Beautiful dreamers.”
The implication here seems to be that they aren't sedated 100% of the time, which strikes me as odd. She's worrying about them being neglected and not having any interaction, but I don't think neglect is really the key issue here. The issue is that being fully conscious, without being able to move or act or blink your eyes or do anything, would be a state of absolute hell, and I can't imagine anyone being able to experience it for more than a few minutes without losing their mind. Here, it sounds like they're putting the kids to sleep for a lot of it, but also waking them up sometimes to play with them, talk to them, educate them, whatever. This seems absolutely bonkers to me. Why not just be merciful and put them in a fucking coma until this entire horrible ordeal is over?

Anyway, the more serious issue is that over time, the patient develops a tolerance to the sedative. Apparently, it's only effective for a maximum of 20 years, at which point the patient wakes up permanently and can't be put back to sleep by the drug. Which means that, even without an apocalypse, they only have 20 years per kid to figure out what's wrong with them and cure it. This leads me to the next point of confusion: what specific conditions led to these kids being candidates for this?

Here is what the text says:

>Some were missing legs and eyes. Others appeared burned or worse. Others appeared intact, so I could only guess they suffered from some internal disease or condition.
The ones that are "intact" actually make the most sense: presumably they're the ones with incurable diseases, or they need organ transplants, or something like that, so they get put into stasis to buy time. The rest of them though? The ones who are missing eyes and limbs, and have third degree burns and so forth? What exactly do the doctors hope to achieve there? If the stasis spell prevents degenerative diseases from progressing, presumably it would also prevent things like wounds healing and scar tissue forming. You stick someone with third degree burns in a stasis pod for 20 years, then in 20 years when you pull them out they will still have third degree burns. Stick someone in there who is missing a leg, that leg will still be gone 20 years later. What exactly was the endgame here supposed to be?

>>375394

The last, and probably most confusing, issue with this is the bit with the maneframe and the robots. This is the part where I don't think the author completely thought things through.

As far as I can tell, the maneframe controls everything in the hospital. The doors, the locks, the various robots, everything. So...exactly whose bright idea was it to create an interface that would allow the vegetable-patch kids to control the entire fucking hospital with their mind powers?

The text only provides a couple of murky clues:

>“Oh, don’t worry about it. Oh, just a heads-up that Robronco will be here to tie the maintenance robots into the system maneframe. Once their control system is linked to the bots, your nurses shouldn’t have to worry about them causing messes.”
This is the last thing that Garnet says to Redheart before the memory orb cuts out. I have read this passage several times over, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what the significance is supposed to be.

Best I can figure, Garnet is saying that Robronco (I don't think I've mentioned it yet but Robronco is the company that manufactures all of the robots we've seen in the book so far) will be coming by to rig up the maintenance bots so that they can be controlled by the maneframe. I'm not sure what the second part is implying, though. The maintenance bots were previously malfunctioning and creating messes? And putting them under control of the maneframe will fix this issue? And then eventually some idiot decides to give the kids total control over the maneframe, so they can use the maintenance robots to make clothing out of other ponies' skins? Is that, uh, basically summing it up?

Next we have this, from later on after BJ wakes up:

>Somepony, I suspected Redheart, had cut the connection between the repair bots and the facility maneframe.
This still doesn't explain why this connection was ever made in the first place. One idea that had occurred to me is that maybe they gave the kids robot doubles or something. Plug a kid's consciousness into the maneframe, then let them each control a robot they could use to walk around and interface with the world until they were out of stasis. That could make sense. Trouble is, this is just more speculation on my part; I have no idea if this is what the author had in mind or not, as he never clarifies it.

Either way, it's clear that at this point in the story, the kids have complete and total control over not only the maintenance robots, but the gun turrets, the surgery-bot, the automatic doors, and all the other systems we've seen them control. Unless the implication is that they somehow figured out a way to hack into these systems, I can't see any way for them to have this level of control unless someone deliberately gave it to them. The fact that there is a big cable connecting the kids' pods to the maneframe suggests that this was done by design, which again...just seems like a really, really stupid thing to do.

Although, honestly, at this point I think I could believe that this world's Fluttershy was actually retarded enough to give bored, paralyzed children complete psychic control over scalpel-wielding robots and programmable gun turrets as a way to keep themselves amused.

>They’d sat here alone, incapable of any interaction at all. Unable to sleep. They couldn’t even kill themselves. Then the Enclave arrived and connected the maneframe again. The children had resumed their games, honed after decades of being trapped within themselves.
The closer I look at it, I think the cable being discussed connects the maneframe to whatever system controls the robots, not the stasis pods to the maneframe. The line I quoted earlier actually refers to the connection between the repair bots and the facility maneframe, so presumably when the cable was cut, the maneframe was no longer able to communicate with the maintenance bots. The kids' stasis pods are presumably just hardwired directly into the maneframe. They are still connected to the system, but can no longer use it to control the bots.

However, all this does is clarify the literal meaning of Somber's ambiguously-worded text; it still doesn't explain why in the wide wide world of fuck anyone thought it would be a good idea to let the coma-kids control every robot in the hospital. Even if they hadn't wound up going insane from being trapped in fully-conscious stasis for 200 years, it seems like this would be a recipe for disaster.

Anyway, fuck; I'm probably overthinking this. I'll just close by saying that once you get past the shock value of the big reveal here, there are a ton of glaring logic holes and ambiguities that ruin a lot of the impact. The outcome I predicted earlier, which Sven was kind enough to screencap [ >>375379 ] would have honestly made a lot more sense imo.

I guess the best thing I can say about this hospital arc is that it kinda-sorta works if you view it as the end result of bureaucratic incompetence. Basically, Fluttershy, the well-intentioned but naïve hospital administrator, wanted to save the children because letting the children die would be sad. However, for various reasons, it was not possible to save the children. So, she did the next best thing: spend probably a metric fuckton of taxpayer money designing an overelaborate solution that accomplished nothing beyond prolonging the inevitable. Then, everyone in Equestria died, and the children were trapped in a state of monstrous living death for 200 years. Then, for reasons that now that I think about it are also never explained, the Enclave showed up one day, and plugged in Fluttershy's preposterously ill-advised system that enabled the insane orphans to control an army of rampaging killbots. Then, the Enclave ponies were killed by the orphans. Then, some more stuff happened, and then finally Blackjack shows up and saves the day.

>>375395

Oh, right, Blackjack. I almost forgot about her.

Well, suffice it to say that Blackjack is in a bit of a spot right now. She's lying on the table with her belly cut open and her guts spilling out, as a surgery-bot controlled by the looney orphans slowly dissects her. However, who should suddenly appear but Morning Glory, who as it turns out is less dead than expected. She flies in with her trusty beam gun, and manages to distract the killbot for a couple of minutes.

Meanwhile, BJ notices P-21 sneaking around the back way like a sneaky-ass motherfucker. He sneaks on up to the maneframe terminal, and sneakily begins trying to hack it, or do whatever the fuck he does with terminals.

With the killbot's attention temporarily diverted, BJ is able to slip out of the restraints binding her to the table. Holding her guts in, she manages to retrieve her automatic shotgun, remove the drum, pack it full of explosive rounds, stuff it under the cable that connects the maneframe to either the orphans or the killbots depending on who you ask, and then SHOT WEB at the drum until it kerplodes. WOOSH! The killbot is now disabled, and the orphans are once again trapped in a state of monstrous living death. The scene ends in a page break.

When BJ regains consciousness, her intestines are back where they are supposed to be. She is lying on a different table, next to some kind of magical regenerative talisman that somehow manages to simultaneously perform complicated surgery and also provide healing and pain relief, simply by being activated and placed next to the patient. As ridiculous as it sounds, this is honestly as farfetched as medicine has gotten in this story so far, so I'm just going to let it slide for now. Also, it turns out the talisman has a time limit, and can only be used once, so there's a reasonable limit to it I guess.

Anywho, other than a small scar, BJ appears no worse for wear. She regrets that they had to use the surgery-talisman on her intestinal spillage, and as such were unable to heal P-21's leg. P-21 tells her not to worry about it, since his leg has been broken for basically the entire story and it doesn't seem to have hampered him very much.

With that nasty business out of the way, they can now move on to the lighter task of murdering 40 insane, paralyzed orphans. Blackjack isn't too keen on doing it, but P-21, ever her better angel, assures her it's probably the right thing to do.

>No. “No no no… fuck no. Fuck!” I yelled as I looked at the pods around me with their wildly zigzagging readouts. I could imagine their screams as they were locked up once again. I rounded on P-21. “I’m not killing forty children! Are you out of your mind?”
39 children is apparently where she draws the line.

Anywho, Morning Glory has a different take on the situation. She thinks that they should just leave the kids in stasis for now, and maybe eventually the Enclave will wander in at some point and rescue them, perhaps later if they're not busy. P-21 thinks that Morning Glory is fucking retarded, and threatens to slap the black off of her if she doesn't shut her whore mouth. He points out that these orphans have killed before, and will likely kill again. You cannot slake an orphan's thirst for blood, once they have had that first sip.

Since the two of them are at a deadlock, and since murdering orphans is usually a democratic decision, it falls to Blackjack to cast the tiebreaking vote. She agonizes over it for an appropriate amount of time, but ultimately pulls the lever in favor of orphan-murder. The trio sings ribald sea chanties as they cast the orphans' souls one by one into the briny deep. After that, they all go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes.

note: I am probably way too sleep-deprived at this point to be doing this, in fact I may even have gone as mad as a bloodthirsty orphan. As such, I may have taken a few liberties in summarizing this last bit. You may want to read it yourself. It's...sad? I think? This goofy arc is giving me a headache, and I don't want to think about it anymore. I'm just going to say that yes, it was probably sad.

Anyway, there's a page break. Blackjack goes poking around in the supply closet where the others found the magic surgery talisman, and there she discovers a bonus: this room contains the mummified carcass of none other than Nurse Redheart, who has recently changed her name to Nurse Deadheart. She apparently had half of her skin peeled away by rampaging orphans, but before joining the choir invisible, she managed to sever the cable that linked the doohickey to the thingamabob. Then, dragging her bloodied and useless legs behind her, she crawled into this storage room to see if they had any Fig Newtons left.

It turns out that yes, there was one box left, but those blasted murderous orphans had gone and eaten them all. As a final 'fuck you', they put one of those goddamn Mane 6 statues inside the box.

Naturally, Blackjack does what any righteous pony in her situation would do: takes the Fluttershy statue away from Nurse Redheart's desiccated corpse, and then cries about doing it.

>“I’m sorry. I tried. I tried to do better. I tried to help…” Slowly I held the Fluttershy figurine to my chest as I slumped over onto my side, weeping and blubbering like a foal. “I’m so sorry.” As I lay there alone in the storage room, I suddenly knew exactly why Redheart had come here:
>To beg for forgiveness she would never receive.
Whose forgiveness? Fluttershy's? Unless I have completely misunderstood this entire chapter, this whole debacle was the end result of Fluttershy's preposterously bad judgement. If this were my story, I would probably just replace "forgiveness" with "Fig Newtons."

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter. I'm going to bed now.

>Footnote: Level Up.
>Skill Note: Speech (50)
>New Perk: Orphan Annihilator - Gain +10 to ATK when target is an Orphan. Add +5 to DMG if Orphan is paralyzed and bloodthirsty.

>>375396
If we take the whole scenario at face value I think the angsting over whether to pull the plug on the two century old deranged orphans is just played up because the author wants the reader feel as torn up and conflicted as the characters. The only realistic and humane or pony-ane, whatever option is to put the foals out of their misery, no-one in the wasteland would expend valuable medicine or turn the mutilated foals into cyborgs even if they were not unhinged, uncontrollable killers. A tragic fate for the foals, and an unpleasant choice to make for our protagonists but not a morally complicated one.

But again, as with kkat's writing, this entire hospital adventure with it's gruesome mutilation, psychological foal torture and mass killing of psychologically tortured foals is just a conga line of edgy nonsense written for its shock value. The most we can probably expect in character development is BJ moaning in her internal monologue about being a foal-murdered in the same vein as she moans about getting Scoodle torn in two.

>>375380
Fallout 1 took place in Southern California 60 years after the bombs fell. It made sense for a regional currency to be established before the protagonist left his Vault to save it.

Fallout 2 takes place in Northern California 80 years later. 140 years after the nuking. A currency anyone can find is replaced with one the NCR has power over.

Fallout 3 comes out 60 years later, 200 years after the nuking, and Fallout 3 brings radioactively mutated/Forced Evolutionary Virus-mutated Jacksons Chameleons and Scorpions and Bottlecaps and other California things to DC. We'll see them again in Boston years later in Fallout 4. The Fallout brand under Bugthesda means Fallout iconography and memberberries.

New Vegas was written by competent writers doing their best in the impossible situation they were put into by Bugthesda, so they had to invent excuses for what happened to NCR dollars. The Brotherhood Of Steel destroyed their gold reserves during a war so the NCR currency couldn't be backed by gold, especially once everyone wanted to exchange it for gold, making it a worthless fiat currency, and many wanted to sabotage the NCR and their money amyway.

Equestria is not Northern or Southern California, or Vegas, or DC. But it's been 200 years since the bombs dropped and ponies are still scavenging perfectly preserved food and medical supplies from stores and functional hospitals and the security bots and killer AIs still work. It's so lazy for every location to be a Fallout thing mistranslated and given a Pony themed coat of paint and maybe some extra stats in the shallowest sense. Parasprites don't become some new unique horror, flying swarms of demonic insects that strip a corpse into a skeleton in seconds. No, Parasprites are just Bloatflies from Fallout by another name. Deathclaws become fucking Diamond Dogs because "making them smart and letting them use guns makes them more dangerous" in the shallowest sense. Sure this boosts their DPS but then they aren't really Deathclaws any more. Taking away a Chameleon's colour-changing and turning it into a giant killer monster was unique. Cunts with guns? Not unique. It's all such a failure of imagination. Even things unique to Ponyland are uncreatively translated into this world. Poison Joke, a plant that fucks with you and takes away one of your greatest strengths, just fucking kills you because this is Edgequestria. Like a photocopy of Bethesda's photocopy of Fallout. Could have had a story arc where Littlepoop gets hit with Poison Joke and becomes a burden and feels like a useless bug, perhaps she becomes tiny to reflect how small she feels against the enormity of the evil universe or whatever, and her friends struggle to keep her safe in their pockets. They could go on a detour to get her cured by a rare witch doctor who demands a high price. Or refuse the detour and focus on the mission even though it just got harder, maybe even impossible. Interpersonal relationships could change for the worse once the main fighter is crippled. Could be great. Any story could use this premise and let sickness or injury matter. But no, that would get in the way of killing big numbers with bigger numbers like a true gamer trying to impress other gamers.

At least PH usually rips off other stuff, not just Fallout, whenever something from Fallout that would normally go there has already been used in the original story.

Also MLP is a setting where Cockatrices can turn you to stone. Magic loves turning flesh to stone and back again. Everything that happened to these kids was entirely unnecessary because Fluttershy forgot Cockatrices exist. Use machines to keep one of those alive if keeping it alive is necessary for keeping the kids alive while turned to stone or keeping them from changing back. Why is this franchise so afraid to engage with the fantasy side of MLP and the limitless possibilities magic can enable? Magic is more than just a cheatcode for healing ponies and throwing heavy stuff.

>>375410
This basically sums up how I feel about it. Unfortunately the whole arc is very kkat-esque, in that it's a contrived situation where plausibility is sacrificed in order to max out the tragedy and horror. Unfortunately you see this a lot in amateur writing, and as I've explained numerous times in these reviews it almost never works as intended.

Stories like these are created through kind of a silly internal dialogue:
>I want to make everyone reading my story feel sad.
<okay, what's the saddest thing you can think of?
>A dead child.
<Yeah, that's pretty sad, but what's even sadder than that?
>Two dead children?
<That's a start, but you have to think bigger.
>What about 40 dead children?
<Now you're talking! That's 40x as sad. You can still make it even sadder, though.
>What if I gave them all incurable diseases?
<Yeah, and maybe have some of them missing eyes and limbs and stuff.
>Also, the protagonist should have to be the one that kills them.
<Yes, and make sure she cries about if afterward.
>Of course she's going to cry, how else would anyone know she's sad?

At this point, you've stopped trying to tell a story and are simply creating sadness porn. The problem is that a work of fiction, by definition, is not real, and the audience knows it's not real, so simply adding a tragic situation to the story is not going to be enough to produce an emotional reaction. You have to make it real. A fictional story is never going to be real in the strict sense of the word, but it needs to be at least believable enough that the reader can imagine it actually happening.

The problem here is that the level of tragedy the author wants is so absurd and over the top that it's almost impossible to think up a plausible situation that could produce it. What realistic chain of events could lead to a scenario where the protagonist is forced to murder 40 children, some of whom have incurable diseases and are missing eyes and limbs? There aren't many options. Thus, whatever you come up with is likely to fall apart under scrutiny, as is the case here.

>A tragic fate for the foals, and an unpleasant choice to make for our protagonists but not a morally complicated one.
What's actually kind of interesting here is that the author might have inadvertently slipped a meaningful lesson into his story.

As you pointed out, there's really no complex moral decision here. The right decision is pretty obvious, it's just not pleasant. It only becomes a moral question when considered in terms of the feminized, humanist morality that's taken over modern thinking, ie that life is always sacred and you shouldn't ever kill. You can actually see this thinking play out in this exchange between Cheerilee and Fluttershy:

>“You’ve tested them on animals and adults. These are children, Fluttershy. Three months being trapped in your own body might be tough for an adult who understands what’s going on, but what about a child? They want to run and play and talk. They can’t simply be locked up for weeks on end. Fluttershy, it’s cruel!”
>Then Fluttershy spoke in a soft and gentle voice, “Are you saying I should leave children to die when I have a way to keep them safe and alive until they can be healed?” At that instant I knew that Cheerilee was screwed.

Here, Cheerilee is quite reasonably pointing out that Fluttershy's cure is worse than the disease. Trapping someone in their own body for years on end, in a state where they are unable to even move, and forcing them to remain conscious through the whole thing, would be unimaginably cruel, even more so to a child. However, Fluttershy just counters this with "but wut about children ded?" and as far as she is concerned this settles the matter.

If these foals are dying, and not even this setting's ridiculously OP healing magic can save them, then realistically there's not much more you can do for them besides ease their suffering. However, Fluttershy believes that it is absolutely immoral to let a foal die if it's possible to save them. So, she cooks up this ridiculous stasis system to keep them alive until...actually, I'm not even sure it was ever established what the endgame of all this was originally supposed to be.

The tragic irony is that the end result was the same as it would have been if Fluttershy had just let the foals die from whatever illnesses they had. The only thing she changed is that they had to endure 200 years of torture beforehand. Also, the ponies who were murdered by the children after they went insane would not have died if it hadn't been for her actions. Her adherence to an absolutist moral principle, ie that not-death is always better than death, ultimately resulted in more death and more suffering than the seemingly cruel but ultimately correct decision to just let nature run its course.

What's more, if you look at it closely, you can't even applaud Fluttershy for sticking to her principles. All she really did was dodge a difficult decision and pass the buck to someone else. Even though this whole situation was 100% Fluttershy's mess, she got to walk away feeling that she did something noble and good. It was ultimately Blackjack, who had nothing to do with any of this and who simply stumbled across this situation by chance, who has to make the hard decision and bear the guilt for the foals' deaths. It's actually pretty appalling that the author has her begging for Fluttershy's forgiveness at the end of the chapter.

Again, I think Somber kind of slipped on a banana peel with this arc and fell ass-backwards into a meaningful lesson. Real heroism and real leadership means being able to make difficult decisions, and do what needs to be done even if you don't feel good about it afterward.

>>375419
That last bit really hammers it home. I always disliked how people consider these fics 'pony-related'. I think they are only on a surface level - you have the characters and iconography and vague allusions to significant elements. But FO:E does not use these things genuinely or with any real interest. There is so much fun, so many cool things to be had if you honestly engaged with the setting of mlp and pony ethics instead of attempting to craft a name-replacement, dour post-apocalyptic setting where they're all just violent humans going through the motion of Fallout for the sole purpose of the crossover.

I hope I can capture pony well with my own autistic grimderp setting.

>>375419
>Poison Joke, a plant that fucks with you and takes away one of your greatest strengths, just fucking kills you because this is Edgequestria.
To be fair, if I remember it right, Poison Joke in FoE doesn't just straight-up kill you. It subjects you to Twilight Zone levels of cruel irony, which most of the time ends in death. Fluttershy said she wanted to be a tree that one time, so it physically transformed her into a tree. That sort of thing.

>Everything that happened to these kids was entirely unnecessary because Fluttershy forgot Cockatrices exist.
This is kind of an interesting idea. The only potential snag I can see is that, iirc, a cockatrice's spell can only be undone by the cockatrice who cast it. So in other words, you could use a cockatrice to turn the kids to stone until a cure could be found, but you would have to ensure that nothing happened to that particular cockatrice, and also figure out the cure within the course of its natural lifespan.

>Use machines to keep one of those alive if keeping it alive is necessary for keeping the kids alive while turned to stone or keeping them from changing back.
This might work, though if the technology works the same way you'd just be subjecting the cockatrice to psychological torture instead of the foals. In that case, by the time you're ready to un-stone the child, the cockatrice might be unwilling to help. Or, maybe it will have gone completely crazy itself and start turning everyone else to stone. All I can say is that if I had stone-turning powers, and someone used me to turn their sick kid to stone until a cure could be found, and then kept me in a state of torturous suspended animation for 200 years until it was time to revive them, at the end of it my attitude would pretty much be that the guy and his kid could just go fuck themselves.

Anyway, the trouble with this is that it doesn't work for engineering the kind of tragedy that Somber wanted to create. So, if any of this had occurred to him, all it would have done is make him realize he needed to scrap the entire arc.

>>374348
>>375192
>>375379
>>375410
>mfw
Clearly, I wrote these. But I have no memory of it.

>>375426
>blacking out only to find shitposts on a kazakhstani horse-whispering forum made in your name
That's concerning. We should get that checked out, me.

Jokes aside, as far as I know there are two swedes frequenting Glimmy's threads. One posts OC, has better grammar, makes good observations about the story being reviewed and is often referred to as Sven. The other is me. Just to clear up any possible confusion.

>>375422
Poison Joke's ironic instant deaths is better than nothing but it feels like a wasted opportunity for authors to never use this to make life harder on the heroes long-term and spend an arc exploring how character dynamics change and dynamic characters grow when subjected to its effects. Just imagine an arc where Blackjack is blinded then gets better in the end. Blindjack could stumble blindly and tap things with her baton and rely on her friends to tell her where to shoot. The author could try to write like a blind person, talking about smells and sounds instead of sights. SATS and EFS can't activate because she can't see shit.

As for the hospital...

A conga line of cockatrices could be created. The one that turned the kids to stone is turned to stone by another, which is turned to stone by another, which is turned to stone by another, and a mechanical system is set up in a lightless underground cage to feed the sole living cockatrice. When it expires, the next cockatrice becomes flesh again, and it stays in the cage and eats and dies and turns the next cockatrice to flesh. Eventually the final cockatrice dies and the kids are restored 200 years later. If the kids cannot be saved by then, get more cockatrices, throw them into the lightless cage one by one, turn the lights on so the current cockatrice is turned to stone by the newcomer, then each newcomer after that is turned to stone, and the waiting game continues. Could set up a Cockatrice Chute so they don't see light until they are safely in the Cockatrice Cage. It could last forever. Or until the world runs out of cockatrices if they cannot be bred or magically created.

Alternatively, experiment with artificial bodies. Brains in jars don't work? Why not? Was the process written off after donor brains from serial killers went evil? Does the brainbot simply use the brain as a CPU enhancer without actually giving the brain control over the machine despite keeping it alive and conscious? What happens if you take the souls from the kids and tie them to suits of armour or weaponry or puppets? Rarity split her own soul 69 times and had some of the soul fragments modified to imitate soul photocopies of her friends, this process was used to create the invincible unbreakable obnoxious stat-buffing Statuettes. Something convoluted involving magic was used to justify a retarded game mechanic instead of doing anything interesting like giving Littlepip a quest to gather many Twilight Sparkle statuettes and combine them into a RealDoll to get a fake Twilight Sparkle on your side, or throw them into Alicorn Creation Goo and hope for the best. Hell, aren't objects infused with a soul supposed to be invincible? Infuse armour pieces and buildings with souls.

Maybe this is all a bit retarded.

Perhaps this scene would have worked better if, when the bombs fell, after fighting off some feral ghouls and psycho bandits desperate to steal supplies, Nurse Redheart looked at the cryo-frozen orphan kids she was supposed to monitor and said to her conveniently placed tape recorder "The bombs fell and everything is chaos. Oh fuck, these kids are going to thaw out and die now that the power is out and we are never getting more supplies. Some of these kids even have rare diseases. Good thing my shotgun has enough shells left for all of them plus me. Tell Fluttershy she still owes me twenty bits."

Blackjack could piece the story together with environmental storytelling and say, damn, that's rough. Then one of her friends could cry about it.

But that means no spoomy shit...

Maybe use misdirection so the heroes think this is some horror movie shit and a psycho killer has been torturing and killing all these kids in hospital beds and we're next. Oh fuck oh shit that pony is missing an arm. And that pony is missing an eye. And that helpless tiny armless legless orphan foal was killed via lethal overdose of a painkiller Blackjack misidentifies as a recreational drug. One pony had its head blown clean off. Whoever did this must have been a really sick fucker. Oh god there's bright red blood all over the place. Oh fuck the lights are flickering. Then after the big reveal, it turns out the spooky murals and blood trails were poorly thought out halloween decorations. The loud bangs? Wind blowing the metal doors around loudly. Egg on the face. All the tragedy happened centuries ago and these ponies were jumping at shadows and other spooky stuff.

Maybe this isn't tragic enough. Maybe the mainframe AI thingy meant to protect this hospital has been crying and going crazy for 200 years stewing in its impotent rage after a power surge broke its ability to control turrets when Nurse Redheart needed it most. But once some idiot fixed the turrets 200 years late it decided "damn you ponies, you always destroy each other so die now. Life is a terminal illness, pain and misery are its symptoms, death is the cure". Or maybe "I am programmed to guard this area and kill everyone without a hall pass or level 3 security clearance".

Maybe it isn't sad enough. Maybe after Redheart kills kids and herself she finds out some unfinished magic circle Twilight or Fluttershy set up in the basement without permission or consent has been storing souls "for their own good, because once our Trapped Souls With Artificial Bodies project works we can cure death" but it was going to be completed one day after the bombs went off. So these kids and Cheerilee were trapped here in a soul container for no reason for 200 years. Maybe the kids could be mad at Cheerilee for aborting them instead of letting them thaw then letting them decide if they wanted to die here or take the risky journey to some potentially safer area? "I mean if you wanted to die anyway why not risk life for us?" A kid might say. Might be wrong to say that. Who knows? Something retarded about hope and sucide could be said here. Maybe right after Redheart dies, frens with medical shit show up. Egg on face. Cue tears. Maybe.

>>375426
>>375427
So there were two of you all along, eh? Well, to avoid confusion, I think I'm just going to call you Sven and the other one Sven.