/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

>>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.
[YouTube] Aces Up [Embed]

Aaaaanyway, Frank finishes up his pep talk, BJ decides to keep on keepin' on, and the scene ends in a page break.
[YouTube] Life's garden, DIG IT Joe Dirt [Embed]

>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.
[YouTube] Family Guy - The rules of New Quahog [Embed]

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.
[YouTube] Simple Plan - Grow Up 10 Hours Extended [Embed]

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.
[YouTube] Final Fantasy VII - Victory Fanfare [HD] [Embed]

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.

[YouTube] Peek•A•Boo! (2023 Remaster) [Embed]

>>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.
[YouTube] The Simpsons - Helen Lovejoy - Think of the children [Embed]

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.

>>375428
disregard that I suck cocks

>>375427
>checked out, me.
^^
>OC
I have no idea what that is.
>good observations
My ego wants it so I will take it but...
>better grammar
This is pure distortion. I've been envious of your range of expression for a while now. My writing always comes out stilted and awkward.
>>375435
^^
I'm six-point-five and there's two of me.
>>375446
You're bit hard on yourself. Regardless, I do too. Besides people who don't are just insecure of their inability to satisfy said penis. Penises are great. They inspire great architecture...
>pic
^^ I tried to draw an autistic hoers in response but my powers are... lacking.

>>375457
>lacking
What about that hoers isnt autistic
>>375446
Its a little late in the game to backpedal bruh, may as well just own it.
(not asserting "lul ur gay", am asserting "lol ur a sperg who says cringey shit")

>>375457
>I have no idea what that is.
Original content, and unless I'm terribly mistaken you've made little greentext posts in previous threads and also engaged in writefaggotry elsewhere on the board. That is what I'm referring to.
>This is pure distortion. I've been envious of your range of expression for a while now. My writing always comes out stilted and awkward.
I was going to argue with you on this point, but being as flattered as I am lazy I've chosen to accept your compliment.

>>375467
Nigel, for the life of me I can't understand why you keep on coming back here, though I suspect it's mostly because this is the last site on the internet that hasn't banned you besides furaffinity, apparently. I honestly don't care what you do either way, but if you do plan on sticking around for awhile, we should probably lay out some ground rules. Here is how this is going to work.

If you continue to make intelligent, concise, on-topic contributions to the review discussion, rendered as human-readable text, as you do here and here:
>>375380
>>375419
then you will continue to be treated like any other poster, and responded to where appropriate.

However, if you're going to start getting all Nigely again, as you have already done here, here and here:
>>375340
>>375428
>>375467
Then this is probably going to go the way it usually goes.

It's entirely your choice. However, if you're planning to choose the latter option, please let me know so I can get to work on Nigel: The Movie Part II.

>>375487
I thought after forming a healthy relationship I would come here to brag about it but then I didn't feel like doing that because I am in a healthy relationship. I am still in a healthy relationship but you were probably getting lonely. I wanted to know if the fimfic is still shit and if people here are still so gay about me they can't be normal in my presence. I don't care what people think of me so I don't care if you photoshop my OC into gay scenarios. You could probably offend multiple furries at once by stealing their porn and photoshopping my OC into it. Honestly I thought the last Nigel movie was pretty funny so let me know if you do another one.

>>375396

Chapter 7: Prices

>Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
>By Somber
>Chapter 7: Prices

Today's fortune cookie:
>“YOU TOUCH IT, YOU BUY IT. We take cash or credit.”

The chapter opens with a monologue from Blackjack. For the first time in the entire story, we are given a clear explanation of what "retiring" a male in Stable 99 actually entails:

>I’m a killer.
>The first pony I killed had been a male unicorn getting removed; that had been before I even got my cutie mark. I’d been told to tell him that he was now U-21 and ask him to report to security. I didn’t know what that meant at the time.
This is what I've suspected all along, but again, the author was ambiguous about it early on, so we could never be certain.

In any case, we now have a clear picture of exactly how the procedure works, so there is no ambiguity anymore. The male is apprehended by security, brought before the Overmare, read some sort of formal discharge paper, and then given a lethal injection. It's all very Logan's Run.

Anyway, BJ goes on, cataloguing all the deaths she's been responsible for so far. Apparently she was responsible for bringing four more males in for retirement; P-21 would have been her sixth total if she'd gone through with it.

She also mentions Scoodle:

>I hadn’t listened to her… no, that wasn’t true. I’d listened. I hadn’t believed her, and I’d been so full of myself that I was sure I could face anything the Wasteland had to offer. I thought that after forty-eight hours I knew more than a filly who’d spent her entire life on the surface. I was wrong. Dead wrong. But I was "lucky" enough that somepony else had been killed by my pride, arrogance, and stupidity.
In all fairness, BJ is being a little hard on herself here. As I observed at the time, Scoodle warned Blackjack about not touching anything in the boneyard, but she didn't bother to explain why.

>At Pony Joe’s I’d tried to turn Glory into a killer just like me. Mad? Upset? Scared? Kill somepony. Pick you right up. Of all the ponies I’d faced, though, the one that stuck with me was that poor bastard shitting himself, and me feeling so clever and cocky for sneaking up on him while he was occupied. I hadn’t learned one thing. I thought I’d changed. That I’d devoted myself to being the better pony. And then I smashed his head in with a baton. I’d thought he’d yell or attack or something. Red is dead. Execution by PipBuck.
Feeling regret about Scoodle and the males in Stable 99 I can understand; the latter case was a mistake that got a comrade killed, and the former was willful collaboration with a policy that she clearly thought was wrong. Her altercations with the raiders, however, were pretty much a kill-or-be-killed type of deal.

Much like its predecessor, this story has kind of a peculiar all-or-nothing take on morality. If killing one pony is wrong, then all killing must be wrong, even when there's clearly no other choice. This thinking creates a number of obvious contradictions that both Somber and kkat seem to have trouble reasoning out.

>Now I’d just killed forty more colts and fillies. Some had been sick; there was no question of that. Letting them live would have been… what? Who the fuck am I to judge if a pony deserves to die? How did I know the Enclave couldn’t have helped them? Or the Collegiate? Or… somepony? Fluttershy said to do better. Better for me was increasing my body count. And the final twist? I ended up with my body completely healed. I felt great.
BJ seems to have learned the wrong lesson from this experience.

There was never any ideal solution to this problem. The forty colts and fillies were dealt a bad hand by life, and that sucks, but from what it sounds like, there was probably nothing that could have been done for them. They would have wound up dead one way or the other. By putting them into suspended animation, Fluttershy was essentially just kicking the can down the road. As a result of her indecision, the foals suffered tortures far worse than what they would have endured if Fluttershy had simply allowed them to die in the first place.

The can that Fluttershy kicked ultimately came to Blackjack, who made the final decision to pull the plug. As was discussed here [>>375410 ] and here [>>375420 ], there was never really much of a decision. BJ's options were to either do what Fluttershy ought to have done 200 years ago, or else do what she actually did and kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with: the Enclave, or the Collegiate, or someone else.

The problem here is, again, her interpretation of morality in terms of absolutes:

>Who the fuck am I to judge if a pony deserves to die?
Nobody lives or dies because they deserve to. Instead of looking at this through a lens of "right" and "wrong," it's better to look at it in terms of actions and consequences.

Some terminally ill foals, who apparently could not even be cured by this setting's unreasonably overpowered healing magic, were put into suspended animation by Fluttershy, because her conscience wouldn't permit her to let children die. As a result, they spent 200 years in a state of fully-conscious living death, and ultimately went insane and became killers themselves. Fluttershy's good intentions don't matter; her actions created a worse result than the one she was trying to avoid.

>Fluttershy said to do better.
If BJ had followed Fluttershy's example, she would have left the foals in the same torturous suspended animation they'd suffered through for two centuries. Maybe the Enclave would have come along eventually, and maybe their technology could have cured whatever was wrong with them 200 years ago. But at that point it hardly matters; they still would have been insane killers.

There were no good options in this situation, but in any case BJ misses the point. It wasn't her responsibility to deal with this mess, but she dealt with it. Fluttershy, who actually was responsible, couldn't do that, and her indecision only made things worse.

>>375488
>you were probably getting lonely
>if people here are still so gay about me they can't be normal in my presence
I see you're still a narcissist, and that you're still missing the point.

Nobody here is obsessed with you or gay for you as you believe. Apart from the times when you're here causing trouble, nobody on this site thinks about you at all. As I have explained to you countless times, the shitty responses you get are a direct consequence of your own shitty behavior. We've all witnessed the Nigel Cycle playing itself out many times before: you show up, behave yourself for a little bit, then start plastering the site with nonsense until people start unloading on you. It always ends the same way: with you throwing a massive tantrum and "leaving for good." You can't reasonably blame anyone for assuming this is just the start of a new cycle.

At this point, everyone on this site knows who you are and has made up their minds about you. Opinions are basically divided between those who see you as an obnoxious shitposter that staff should have permabanned years ago, and those who see you as an autistic lolcow who's fun to screw with. Everyone else just ignores you. This situation is the cumulative result of your long history of toxic behavior on this site, and you have no one to blame for it but yourself. We've gone over all of this many times before, so there's no sense going over it again in detail.

In any case, it doesn't matter. If you want to stay, then please at least try to behave yourself. If you want to go, then best of luck to you wherever you land. Your time on this earth is yours to do with as you please.

>>375489

Blackjack wraps up her inner monologue by concluding that she is a "cleaner, healthier raider with better aim." Her feelings of guilt make sense, but it seems like she's being harder on herself than is warranted.

The situation with Scoodle was an accident, and in the situation with the foals there were no good options. As far as the males in Stable 99 go, it's nothing to be proud of, but at the same time she was just doing her job. She's no more culpable than anyone else who lived in the same Stable and abided by the same policies. Apart from those incidents, she's mostly just killed enemies in battle. The overall merits of her actions so far could be debated I guess, but I don't personally think she's done anything beyond the pale and anyway, Littlepoop was worse :DDDDD.

Anyway, P-21 comes up and asks her if she's okay, and she says that yes, she's okay, even though she's clearly not okay. The scene ends in a page break.

Next, she negotiates a deal between the Collegiate and the Society. The basic deal is that the Collegiate gets to conduct research, or whatever they're trying to do exactly, in the upper floors of the hospital, but in return they have to provide medical aid to anyone who needs it, including Prince Whoever's comatose father. The Society gets first dibs on any technological breakthroughs that the Collegiate might discover, and in return they will stand guard around the hospital and provide protection to the Collegiate while they conduct their research. I'm not sure how tough we should really expect the Society to be, since they couldn't even handle a few murderous orphans on their own, nor could they handle the Collegiate themselves, who ought to have been a pushover if they need the Society to protect them. But, I guess we'll put a pin in that for now.

Anywho, with all that out of the way, the party collects payment and moves on. Morning Glory appears to have found a battle saddle somewhere, so she's got that now, though it looks like she doesn't yet know how to use it.

>My head crashed over and over with what I’d done, pushing the mystery of EC-1101 from the forefront of my thoughts.
Honestly, she should feel worse about this sentence than about the murders.

>Maybe I should have turned the kids over to the Collegiate. No… while they’d been fascinated by the notes I’d found, they’d been relieved that I’d disposed of the foals. Not their problem. The Society? Same. Everypony was glad they didn’t have to deal with forty traumatized and dying young.
All the more reason she deserves commendation for being the only person horse, whatever in the room willing to step up and deal with the situation. The crazy robo-orphans were a hot potato that nobody wanted to touch; kudos to BJ for taking the initiative.

Anyway, tl;dr she's still in a bad mood.

>I was so angry I felt like a broken Sparkle-Cola bottle.
Honestly, she should be angrier about this lame simile.

>“Shut up,” I snapped, and I was glad to see him angry. Because he was about to say it wasn’t my fault. If it wasn’t my fault, was it his for leaving the choice up to me? Glory’s for not stopping me? The Enclave for reconnecting the maneframe to the maintenance robots? Redheart? Fluttershy? Should I just blame ponies who fucked up two centuries before I was even born? Celestia? Zebras? Who was to blame? Who had to pay for what I’d done?
It literally was Fluttershy, all of it. She's the one who developed a system for entombing the minds of orphans in their own paralyzed bodies until they went insane, and she's the one who authorized its use.

>Somepony had to pay the price. Better me than P-21. Maybe if he was smart he’d ditch me before I got him killed. They’d be better off together without me. Perhaps in a few months they’d find me frothing mad, psychotic, and put me down.
Oh, give it a rest, Emo McGee. Seriously though, if this is the end result you're looking for, you could always just plug yourself into one of Fluttershy's orphan-sarcophagi for a couple of centuries and see how you turn out.

Anyway, while she's moping, she inadvertently leads them into an ambush. It's a pretty standard deal: couple of raiders hiding out in an abandoned trailer. One opens fire on them with a shotgun, the other is armed with a pool cue still not sure how or why a horse would play pool, but we'll put a pin in that for now.

>Out came the automatic pistol and S.A.T.S. popped up. Four shots to Shotgun’s head. Execute. Then I noticed that instead of turning his head into meaty goo, the two shots that hit just sparkled off his hide. Shit. I’d forgotten I’d loaded the clips with shock rounds: great against robots, but lousy against everything else.
Kind of a pain in the ass when you have to deal with twenty different types of ammo. Might be easier to just pick one type of weapon and specialize, instead of just picking up every single firearm you come across and lugging it around the Wasteland with you.

Anyway, she kills the pool-cue raider by stabbing him in the eye with his own pool cue, and then uses his body to block the next blast from the shotgun. Glory is fiddling with her battle-saddle, trying to get it to work. Then, P-21, who I guess is just standing around while all of this is happening, points out a sniper on a nearby hill.

BJ runs into the trailer and beats the shotgun-raider to death with her baton. When she comes back out, Glory is flying around chasing another pair of raiders, that I guess came from somewhere. She doesn't have especially good aim with the saddle, but she's doing a good job of keeping them occupied. BJ takes the opportunity to headshot one of them with her pistol. The second one tries to throw a grenade at her, but she uses magic to yank the pin while it's still in his mouth. His head explodes, and that's all they wrote of him.

Meanwhile, the sniper takes a shot at her, misses, and she goes charging after him. He runs, and leads her into a camp with four more raiders.

>>375491

One of the raiders in the camp levitates an SMG, so BJ smacks her horn with the baton until she drops it. Then, BJ picks it up and uses it to mow down the remaining raiders, except for the unicorn with the broken horn. It sounds like she kills a grand total of eight of them.

With all of that out of the way, BJ now observes that there are some chained-up prisoners in the raider camp.

>“They’re slavers,” the lead pony in the chain said as he stared hard at the unicorn.
>“Slavers?” I asked, frowning in confusion. The lead pony looked a little concerned that I didn’t recognize the term. “I thought they were raiders.”
Yeah, I remember being a little confused about this distinction myself.

>“Not much difference except in levels of crazy,” he muttered. “Not every Wastelander is a psychopathic cannibal,” he said as he looked at my stable barding. “Slavers round up ponies and sell us to places like Paradise, Appleloosa, or Fillydelphia.” The gray pony glared at the squirming unicorn. I knew that glare. “They work a pony to death, and it doesn’t take long.”
Apparently, the distinction is that slavers have an actual, logical reason for doing what they do that makes sense in-world. Raiders, by contrast, are just generic goons who go around murdering ponies because reasons, and spend their free time pissing and shitting all over their own residences, also because reasons.

Apparently, this is a line for BJ. It seems the idea of someone trying to make a living through disreputable yet practical means enrages Blackjack even more than the raiders' purposeless acts of wanton destruction. She reloads the SMG with explosive rounds I am not exactly a firearms expert, but this feels like a bad idea and puts the barrel up against the unicorn's eye.

>I could almost forgive raiders now; they were at least crazy. She’d chosen to perpetuate this nightmare. Her life was forfeit! I just had to end her. End everything. Make it nine!
Again, even though she's clearly a little worked up, I can't say I understand her thinking here. The slavers aren't exactly involved in a reputable trade, but at least their motivations make sense. Nothing has ever made sense about the raiders.

Anyway, she's about to pull the trigger, when suddenly a thought occurs to her:

>Be strong. Be kind.
Yes, it would seem that it's this unicorn's lucky day well, aside from being permanently horn-crippled I guess. Apparently moved by some slogans she read on a couple of action figures she found, BJ has a sudden change of heart. It would seem that Applejack, who has barely been mentioned at all in this story, and Fluttershy, who I would once again like to stress is directly responsible for trapping forty orphans in their own bodies for two centuries and driving them mad, have somehow set good enough examples that BJ reconsiders her decision to rapid-fire an entire clip of explosive rounds into the unicorn's cute widdle eyeball. The "Dear Princess Celestia" letter practically writes itself.

Ultimately, BJ decides that eight murders is enough for today well, forty-eight if you want to be technical, and lets the ninth one go free, on the condition that she never, ever do anything this naughty again. She agrees, and the deal is concluded.

With all that nasty business out of the way, P-21 suggests that it might be time to unlock the chained ponies. However, it would seem BJ has better things to do:

> I walked away from the slaver camp. I found a rock, pressed my face to it, wrapping my forehooves around it, and I wept, choked, and sobbed. Then I felt a hoof stroking along my mane. I peeked up at Morning Glory as she gave me a soft smile.
>“You did the right thing,” she said gently.
Over the top violence, check. Maudlin emotional bullshit, check. If Somber can just work in a goofy moral backed by questionable reasoning, I might just have Fallout Equestria Bingo here.

>“Yes,” she replied as she looked back at me. “What she did was wrong. Killing her won’t undo it. But she’s still alive and she’ll have to make a choice. Maybe she’ll choose to stop. Maybe she’ll convince others to stop. Maybe she won’t. No matter what, we’re not going to make the Wasteland any better by killing everypony. Even if we really think they deserve it.”
>“I’m no different from her,” I muttered softly, voicing the poisonous words.
>“How can you say that?”
>“Because it’s true. I’ll kill anypony if my Eyes Forward Sparkle says to. Red it’s dead. Yellow be mellow. Right?” I felt disgusted at my supposed wit.
>“Was she red or yellow?” Glory asked as she lay down and crossed her forelimbs.
>“Huh?”
>She nodded in the direction the slaver had fled. “Was she red or yellow when you spared her?”
>“I…” I frowned. “I don’t remember. I don’t think I checked.”
>“So you chose to spare her. Not your PipBuck,” Glory said with a little cock of her head that made me smile. “You’re a killer, Blackjack, but you’re not a raider. You can choose. You care enough to choose.”
"Dear Princess Celestia: Today I learned that it's okay to kill eight ponies, as long as you let the ninth one go free after permanently crippling her. Also, I learned that it's wrong to kill just because your PipBuck tells you to. You should listen to your heart, because that's the only way you'll truly know whether or not a pony deserves mercy or an unspeakably gruesome death."

Yep, pretty sure that's a Bingo.

>She was right. I could choose. I chose to kill forty colts and fillies. No pep talk or show of mercy would change that. There was a price to be paid for being a killer. I was going to pay for it.
How much?

Anywho, after a page break, they go back to the slaver camp and unchain all the ponies. They divide up the slavers' weapons amongst the prisoners. For some reason, the freed ponies all wander off in different directions instead of traveling in a group, which is probably how they got captured in the first place. Oh well, it's not as if intelligent NPCs have ever been a staple of this setting.

>>375493

One of the NPCs is named Frisk, and he advises BJ to look him up if she ever makes it as far south as Flank. He assures her that he will "put in a good word" for her. I have no idea what this means or with whom he intends to put in a good word, but I'm assuming this will be significant at some point in the future.

Things get a little autismo from here. Morning Glory uses one of the slaver's knives to decapitate one of the dead slavers. Blackjack is all like wtf, and Glory explains that she wants to dissect his brain to see if there are any abnormalities that could explain raider behavior. The text made an explicit point of mentioning that this last batch of enemies were slavers, and not raiders, and because this distinction apparently matters in this setting, Glory's actions seem even more bizarre. However, I guess we'll just have to put a pin in that for now. MG is now collecting severed raider heads, so she can dissect their brains later. Righty-o.

At this point, the text abruptly segues from this discussion of brain-dissection into another fight, in what is probably one of the most awkwardly-written passages I've come across so far:

>The fight with the raiders proved terribly short. Nine. Almost disappointing. Ten. There were only four of them and they didn’t have a gun between them. Eleven. Glory got her second head and looked decidedly happy about the fact. Twelve.
I had to read this four times before I understood what the fuck is going on. At first it looks like there are nine raiders, then suddenly there are ten, then four, then eleven, then one of them gets decapitated, then suddenly there are twelve. However, the numbers BJ keeps shouting out are actually a continuation of her count from earlier. She killed eight slavers; the unicorn would have been number nine, but she let that one go. This current fight is against four raiders, so when she finishes them all off, her grand total stands at twelve. Glad we got that all sorted out. Unfortunately, this isn't the last we'll see of this autism with the counting.

Anyway, when she's done tallying up dead raiders, she turns on the radio. She is worried about being further lionized by the DJ, but it seems like the DJ has moved on to more enticing mares:

>Occasionally he referenced other ponies fighting the good fight all across Equestria. One that he called the ‘Stable Dweller’ seemed to have completely shut down a town of slavers. Now that was impressive.
This confirms that the timeline of this story runs concurrently with that of kkat's original. We're on Ch. 7 currently, and the events the DJ is referencing would place us somewhere between chapters 7 and 8 of kkat's story.

>I doubted the Stable Dweller would ever kill a room full of helpless ponies.
Clearly there's a lot you don't know about the Stable Dweller.

Anyway, as soon as she's done gushing about the "Stable Dweller," the DJ resumes gushing about Blackjack. Her latest exploits are recounted in detail. Bizarrely, a soundbite is also included:

>I froze dead in my tracks as my voice, slightly strained and tinny, played out from my PipBuck. “Get the fuck out of here. Find another line of work. Tell every slaver you know to find another line of work. I see you doing this shit again and I will turn you into paint! Do you understand me? Do you fucking understand me?!” Followed by her cry of ‘Yes!’ Did I really sound like that?
I have no idea how or when this audio would have been recorded, or how the recording would have ended up in the hands of the DJ. Blackjack, for whatever reason, is not even remotely curious about it; her reaction is just the usual "aw shucks, it weren't nothin'" routine.

However, it seems that there's a bit more to what's eating her than just basic humility. She still feels guilty about the foals I guess, and this seems to be feeding into deeper-rooted concerns about the overall morality of her actions so far:

>“I’m not a fucking hero!” I yelled at him, so angry I was glad that I wasn’t holding a gun. Thirteen. Oh wait… I was… “I kill ponies that try and kill me or try and kill ponies who don’t deserve it! I didn’t kill those slavers because they were evil and wrong! I shot them because they shot first and my PipBuck was red.” Thirteen… “If I hadn’t chased after that sniper I wouldn’t have had a clue there were slaves up there at all!” I said, watching their smiles vanish, seeing the gun tremble in my magical grip.
Ironically, Blackjack's problem seems to be the exact opposite of Littlepip's in the original.

My whole issue with LP was that she came across as an insane megalomaniac, but neither she nor the author ever seemed to pick up on this aspect of her character. She spent the whole book running around the Wasteland, indiscriminately picking fights with random strangers according to some vague moral code, the tenets of which were never explained. It was never clear what she believed in, or why she believed in it; all we knew was that she was driven by an obsessive desire to "do good" and "fix things," and in her view, as well as the author's, this apparently justified every insane, destructive, reprehensible thing she did. What's more, her reckless behavior was praised everywhere she went.

Blackjack is almost her complete opposite. There are no delusions of grandeur here; this is just a regular-ass Stable pony who, through no serious fault of her own, keeps ending up in dangerous situations and reacting accordingly. She's consumed by guilt because of all the ponies she's had to kill, but every kill she's made so far has been in self defense or out of necessity. But, here's the kicker: the reason she feels guilty is because she killed reactively, or in self defense, instead of self-righteously seeking out the world's villains and gunning them down in cold blood. In other words, this horse feels guilty because she doesn't have any of the traits that made Littlepip such a reprehensible protagonist.

>>375558

Since the DJ just brought it up, let's compare Blackjack's actions so far with those of the "Stable Dweller."

At this point in the original FoE, Littlepip had just arrived in New Appleoosa, after being accidentally shot by Calamity. She learns that New Appleoosa uses the rail line to trade with the nearby settlement of Old Appleoosa, who are primarily in the business of buying and selling slaves. LP sweet-talks the train caravan into giving her a ride up to Old Appleoosa, and once there she proceeds to infiltrate the town, gun down nearly everyone who lives there, and free their captive slaves. She then hijacks the train and rides it back to New Appleoosa. Along the way it derails and crashes. She sends the freed slaves back to New Appleoosa, along with a message ordering the town's leader to take them on as a burden and care for them, while she goes on her merry way. She offers the town no compensation, no explanation for her actions, and no apology for the disruption of the town's only trade route.

Neither LP nor the author ever attempts to clarify why she did any of this. LP actually has no tangible objectives at this point in the story, other than "find Velvet Remedy," which is a goal she has long since given up on (though incidentally she does come across Velvet by chance while in the process of terrorizing Appleoosa). As far as I can tell, kkat's reasoning is that "slavery is bad and everyone reading already understands this, so everything LP does is self-explanatory."

Whatever anyone might think about the ethics of slavery, it's a fact that LP's attack on New Appleoosa was completely unprovoked, and it also caused a great deal of collateral damage. However, she never questions the morality of what she did, nor does any other character in the story. The closest anyone ever comes is the town leader, who bans her from New Appleoosa despite agreeing in principle with what she did.

Now let's take a look at Blackjack.

At this point, she has two clear objectives: figure out what the deal with this EC-1101 file is, and find and defeat this Sanguine person who ordered the invasion of her Stable. Her pursuit of the first goal leads her to Megamart. There, she learns that the Finders can decode the file for her, but the price is 10,000 caps. She takes on a series of contracts in order to earn the money she needs. One of her contracts leads her to an abandoned weather station, where she meets Morning Glory. After MG joins the party, the trio decides to wipe out the raider hive that had attacked and killed MG's companions.

When this is done, the group moves on to their next contract, which involves clearing "squatters" out of an abandoned hospital. When they arrive, they encounter two entrenched factions who are at odds with each other. The contract was put out by one faction hoping to oust the other.

After meeting briefly with the two factions, BJ decides to explore the upper stories of the hospital, believing that if she clears out whatever enemy is up there, she will be able to broker an arrangement that will be amenable to both parties and collect a nice paycheck in the process. While exploring this area, she discovers that the "enemy" is actually just a bunch of foals who were put into suspended animation by Fluttershy 200 years in the past. They have since gone insane.

For reasons unknown, Fluttershy gave these foals the ability to plug into the hospital's maneframe system and manipulate its maintenance robots. The insane foals have been using these robots to murder anyone who happens to venture into their domain. Though she feels sorry for the foals, Blackjack realizes that the only viable option is to put them out of their misery and prevent them from doing any more harm, so she shuts down their life support machines and kills them.

The contrast in quality between these story arcs should be obvious to anyone. Littlepip, a character with no goals or motivations to begin with, undertakes a series of destructive and dangerous actions for no obvious reason. There is no deep soul-searching on her part; while she seems to feel bad, at least in a general way, about all the ponies she had to kill, she never once questions her basic right to do what she did.

Blackjack, by contrast, sets out with a clear set of goals. In the process of trying to accomplish these goals, she encounters situations that force her to take actions she is not comfortable with. Whether or not she made the right choices can be debated, but what's important is that her reasons are clear to the reader, and they make sense. She attacked the raider band because they had supplies she wanted and because she wanted to help Glory get revenge for her friends. She went into the hospital because she was hired to do so. She killed the foals because it was the most humane option.

She comes across as more sympathetic and admirable than Littlepip, because even though her actions would probably seem reasonable to most people, at least under the circumstances, she still feels guilt and questions her own motivations.

Now, that said, I personally find her angsty whining in this chapter so far to be tiresome. I also disagree with how she's thinking about this. Consider this line:

>I kill ponies that try and kill me or try and kill ponies who don’t deserve it! I didn’t kill those slavers because they were evil and wrong! I shot them because they shot first and my PipBuck was red.
This is an extremely silly thing to feel guilty about. If someone attacks you with obvious deadly intent, defending yourself is a sane and normal response. Their reasons for attacking you don't matter. It may not be necessary to kill them in order to protect yourself, but at the same time, if you leave them alive there's a chance they can still hurt you. If mercy or some personal code of ethics compels you to spare your attacker that's one thing, but I think most sensible people would agree that you have no obligation to.

>>375490
Posting off-topic is only a bad thing when Nigel does it. When anyone else freaks out and screams Nigel at the sight of a british flag, that's normal for this site and nobody bats an eye. Such tiresome hypocrisy. Maybe the clowns will call this observation a conspiracy, leftists love that tactic and most people on this site are just leftists in spirit. But it's okay. I don't really respect anyone here. Except glim, he's good at reviewing dogshit pony fanfiction. I wish other people here were good at stuff. But I still don't respect him enough to care what he or anyone else thinks of me. Hopefully if I leave the thread gays will stop derailing it.

>>376005
>Hopefully if I leave the thread gays will stop derailing it.
>*derails thread*
lmao, never change, Nigel.

Anyway, I'll probably be getting back to this review as well as my other thread sometime later this week.

Eh, it makes sense for MG to dissect a normal raider first. Even if we assume that whatever education she had in the enclave included anatomy lessons and a dissection she probably never saw the insides of a non-pegasus before. You want a template so you can spot abnormalities. I mean for all we know a unicorn brain has a bunch of magic crystals or some shit inside.
What makes less sense is the decapitation, the central nervous system includes the spinal cord and even if you ignore that you can just crack a skull open without taking if off the body. I did so. Well unless she intends to carry a bunch of brain jars around which would be funny.
Also, if my memory of reading this probably as it came out serves (fuck I'm old) this will develop into an important plotpoint and lead to BJ doing something that is supposed to be considered horrific and BJ will feel bad about it (wow just like the murderfoals!) but you'll laugh about it. Then again I might mix it up with the other FOE stories, it's been over a decade.
In conclusion somber does seem to have prewritten several threads and the crew does come across them but due to the readers lacking information as much as BJ and company do things don't make sense even from the perspective of a reader with information on FOE, Fallout, MLP and the concept of a gun.

One thing I just realized: Over here none of the main characters are wastelanders. You have selftaught hacker and professional whore P-21, 3 INT 10 STR BJ and bleeding heart medic MG. Littlepip was at least a technician (a job that requires more brainpower than smash thing with stick) and pretty much right away got Calamity as a permanent companion, who has a ton of wastelander and enclave experience.

>>373145
>We were recycled
Soylent Green is PONIES
>>373145
>hereditary jobs
Pretty obvs. that Somber was just vying for a reasonable start to the story, as opposed to a cohesive and well-thought-out explanation for thinga
>>373291
>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
Right? Ppl be like "Its just like with ppl, but ponies". Nah. No it isnt. Theres logistical questions that cant be deferred without losing credibility.
>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
Preach! Er,.. cook!
>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
Lets just file tobacco cultivation under the pretense of 'something that was once grazed, but was further cultivated cuz reasons'
>>373293
>spending the rest of your life not getting laid, which presumably some guys can't handle
Consider the target audience
>>373576
>This paragraph is all over the place, and it's not really clear what BJ's priorities are right now
Ngl, I feel that lends credence to the story. So far, it feels like a story that starts with a rando in a particular (but not egregious) context, being led toward the actual story
>>373580
>I'm sorry, but her behavior here does not make sense.
I mean,... Im surprised that its gotten this far before a major incontinuity error
>>373594
>dropping a .38 revolver in the process
Acktshually, that calibur is registered as either .38 special, or .380
>the raiders in this story are cannibalistic
Based, just saying
>I'm not quite sure what's supposed to be happening here, but this sounds like bullshit
Cuz it is
>My understanding is that the whole point of a revolver is that it's not supposed to jam up like this
It isn't. Like you suggest,
the amount of negligence that would cause this level of mechanical failure is absurd
>they should retrieve this file and see if they can use it to lure the mercenaries away
A very dubious conclusion, but okay
>what happens next
Should I be surprised anymore?
>>373738
>Marmalade accuses Blackjack of harlotry
>Ur a hoe
Quality
>EC-1101 transferred
Macguffin acquired
>Yeah, I have absolutely no fucking idea what's going on anymore
Pretty sure the Macguffin is searching for a wifi signal
>It didn't make sense in kkat's story, and it doesn't make sense now
Oh please, we all know Qanon shaman marked a few desks while he was in there
>>374316
>Seriously, nigger, don't do shit like this
Oh come on, let him glory-fag for a moment, while this turns into a GTA flashback (what? You put "I ran" on,...)
>You've never been outside before, remember?
Oh, just write it off as "the left" or "the right". Hardly the best point to draw contention on

(break)

Spoiler-free:
Anyone with concerns about caps as a currency, you're gonna like the next part. Also, Somber might be a little based given his(?) scripting of Usury

>>375559

>If I hadn’t chased after that sniper I wouldn’t have had a clue there were slaves up there at all!
Similar issue here. The sniper fired on her and ran, so she chased after him. When she caught him, she came across some other members of his party. They were part of the group that was attacking her, so she reasonably saw them as enemies and killed them too. She hasn't done anything beyond the pale from what I can see.

Here is what's going on: Blackjack is basically upset with herself because she killed an attacker in self defense, and is now being lionized for it because it turns out the attackers were slavers. However, she had no idea these ponies were slavers, she was only shooting back because they shot at her first. She feels guilty because she was only reacting to the situation, not meting out some kind of righteous justice as the DJ is implying.

Now, here is my concern: there is a subtle implication that the opposite situation, ie BJ attacking and killing the slavers because they are slavers, even if they hadn't actually shot first, would somehow have been better. This is basically how Littlepip behaved during the Appleoosa arc: she attacked and killed the slavers of Appleoosa because she morally disapproved of what they were doing, not because they were a threat to her or to anyone she cared about. Blackjack is essentially comparing herself unfavorably to Littlepip; or, more accurately, Somber seems to be comparing his character unfavorably to kkat's.

One reason I enjoy doing these fanfic reviews is that analyzing the mistakes of popular authors can help subsequent authors avoid similar pitfalls. As I've said, I get the impression that many fanfic authors are just taking their inspiration from other fanfic authors, so they tend to absorb each others' mistakes. Project Horizons is not great literature by any stretch of the imagination, but my observation so far has been that Somber has taken kkat's basic formula and improved on it. However, Somber likely took his inspiration from kkat, and probably looks up to kkat to some degree (misguided though that may be). It's possible he wanted to create a more Littlepip-like character, and has realized that he's missed this mark with Blackjack. The reason he missed the mark is that he actually wound up creating a better character, but he may not actually see it that way; if he tries to jam this character into a more Littlepip-like role, he's only going to be shooting himself in the foot.

I want to stress that the actual moral question under debate here is not really all that important. The issue is basically whether or not vigilantism is morally justified, and a writer could take either position and still create a good, likable character that reflects their position. Batman, or Rorschach from the Watchmen if you want a more extreme example, are clearly vigilante characters, and both are well-known and well-liked. If you placed either of them in FoE, they would probably make the same choice as Littlepip: take down the slaver town even though the slavers hadn't directly attacked them.

However, while Batman and Rorschach are generally seen as sympathetic, likable characters, Littlepip comes across as psychotic, unhinged and frankly detestable. Why? The reason is basically what I detailed above: Littlepip has no real motivation for doing what she does, nor does she have any character traits that make her especially likable for any other reason.

Batman fights crime because his parents were killed by criminals; this is a clear and understandable motivation. He refuses to kill because he considers this to be the line that separates vigilantism from criminality. This is a personal code that shapes and defines his character. From this simple set of attributes, an entire complex character has been created and reinterpreted over the decades.

Rorschach takes this character concept further. It's been a long time since I've read Watchmen, but iirc his backstory is that he was a troubled child from a poor background, who developed a sense of justice in response to the horrible things that happened in his own life and that he saw going on in the world around him. This leads him to take on the role of a vigilante, and while he initially struggles with the same moral questions as Batman, ie whether killing criminals would make him as evil as the evil he's trying to fight, Rorschach ultimately reaches the opposite conclusion. After a particularly gruesome case, he concludes that the only way to fight darkness is to become the darkness. He adopts an uncompromising, utterly ruthless moral absolutism; he doesn't want to punish evil, he wants to destroy it.

For writers, the specifics of a character's values are far less important than why they hold the values that they hold. A character should be a complete personality; the reader should never be in doubt about why they took a specific action. If Rorschach were the protagonist of FoE, he would likely have annihilated the slaver village as well; however, there would be no question of why he did it.

As a side note, there's actually an amusing bit of irony here. Alan Moore is a notorious leftist, and he designed Rorschach as a criticism of the kind of extreme, uncompromising moralism that underpins the vigilante ethos. He was trying to create an unlikable character, but he wound up writing him so well that his efforts had the opposite effect: Rorschach wound up being the character that most readers loved and sympathized with. Conversely, kkat clearly wrote Littlepip as a hero, but she was such a poorly-constructed character that the effect was also the opposite of what was intended: she came across as an insane, ruthless psychopath who was impossible to like or sympathize with or at least that was my reaction; fans of the series seem to disagree with me on this point.

>>376221

Anyway fuck; I'm getting off-topic here.

To summarize: Blackjack is now mired in some kind of crisis of conscience over whether or not she was justified in killing all of the ponies she's had to kill so far, and the DJ is making it worse by lionizing her as some kind of hero. This stands in direct contrast to her in-world counterpart Littlepip, who kills the crap out of nearly everyone she meets, and is also lionized as a hero, but never questions her right to do any of it. Meanwhile, both of these whorses stand in direct contrast to Alan Moore's Rorschach, who would have killed the same ponies as either of these two, while actively disdaining the very thought of having a moral crisis about anything. Now that we've got all that cleared up, let's get back to the story.

There is a page break. When we rejoin Blackjack, she is in a strange room and has no idea how she got there.

>The room was small but neatly organized. A desk in one corner with a terminal. A safe. A shelf holding numerous books. A refrigerator in the second corner. Wastebasket. Then the cot I occupied in the third corner. I saw a toilet and sink through one open door.
Not even a single skeleton in here? How creepy.

>A faded plastic banner hung near the ceiling reading ‘Megamart, always lowest prices, always highest quality’. Lowest prices…
In the previous scene, she appeared to be close to having some kind of mental breakdown. So far it's looking like she passed out, and was probably carried back to Megamart by her two hapless companions, which would make sense since I believe that's where they were headed anyway.

>There were other things too. Little hints of a world before this one. The Megamart employee of the year had been somepony named Boxcars. There was a little award for record profits selling ‘canned and preserved foods and ammunition’. A strange photograph of two groups of soldiers in the parking lot, one in green combat armor and the other… zebras with red stripes? A curly-maned mare with purple glasses bumped hooves with a red zebra filly. The caption read ‘Macintosh’s Marauders invade Megamart with the Red Stripes. Great deals ensue.’
This was a recurring problem I had with the original FoE. I can understand this world's various ruined, uninhabited locations being more or less preserved as they were at the moment the megaspells went off, and hence there still being a lot of old photographs and wartime propaganda on the walls. However, for locations like this, that have since been taken over and repurposed, it makes no sense.

The Finders have been using this building as their headquarters for the last 200 years, but they left all of the original wall hangings and furniture intact? Never bothered to move any of it around, or at least get rid of it since it wouldn't suit their purposes?

I mean, if the world ended in a nuclear holocaust tomorrow, and I wound up moving into the local Wal Mart because it was the only building in the area that wasn't destroyed, I'd at least feng shui things around a little; I wouldn't keep everything exactly the way the store's management had left it. If we were to fast-forward 200 years, it would probably be safe to assume that countless individuals or families would have occupied that structure by then, with each of them modifying it to suit their purposes. It likely wouldn't even resemble a Wal Mart at all, and that's assuming it hadn't been torn down and replaced with a newer building.

Anyway, yada yada yada, it turns out that BJ is indeed back at the Finders' headquarters in Megamart. The specifics of how she got there are left vague; presumably it's something close to what I described above.

Bottlecap, the mare we met earlier, who I guess is the Megamart's assistant manager or something, is in the office. She explains to BJ that her friends dumped her off in here, collected payment for the various contracts they fulfilled, stripped BJ of her barding, and carried it off to have it repaired.

Bottlecap also has some advice for BJ on her present moral crisis:
>“Hero.” She said the word almost with disdain. “The Wasteland is no place for heroes. It chews heroes up and swallows them. They burn out, burn up, or change for the worse. The price of being a hero is just too high in the Wasteland,” Bottlecap said as she sat, looking at me with a warm smile. “I think you are an individual and judge you accordingly, instead of holding you to some romantic ideal of how I think you should act.”

BJ still seems a bit manic under the surface, but for the time being she decides to accept this. Their conversation turns to...what I am going to generously call "practical" matters:

>“What are you working on?”
>“Finding a way to keep the Megamart in business,” she replied as she looked at the numbers. “The same thing I do every day. Your work on the Manehattan Highway gave us some wiggle room, but we’re bleeding trade month after month.”
>“Really? I’m sorry you’re losing money.” I knew less about business than I did terminals and medicine. My condolences seemed to amuse her.
What the hell is this place, some kind of chain? If she doesn't turn a profit every month the Finders won't be able to make rent payments on this ruined building in no-man's-land that they occupy? If she doesn't sell her monthly quota of machine gun rounds then Finder Corporate is going to shut this location down, and then the Raiders or the Enclave or some other faction will take over the building and put a Quiznos here? Seriously, wtf? This hands down the goofiest, most illogical post-apocalyptic setting I've ever encountered.

>>376222
>Anyway fuck; I'm getting off-topic here.
Yeah ya are
>If she doesn't turn a profit every month the Finders won't be able to make rent payments on this ruined building in no-man's-land that they occupy?
Well, if you'da kept reading,....
Ngl, the whole "everything is bad an (author) should feel bad" schtik works for most fanfics and maybe it works for his one? Maybe its a personal thing? In any case, at the risk of being contrary you might enjoy he story a bit more if you didnt seem to be looking so hard for reasons to not enjoy it.
For example, that bit about the 200y/o employee of the month.
Does it make logical sense? No. Should i have been removed, rewritten, etc.? Obviously.
Having said, when one reads fanfiction with the intent of enjoying it, they can ignore, skip over, and disregard unnecessary shit. Case in point, I completely glossed over the description of place and filed it under "Yeah, yeah, its old and dingy like the rest of everything."
It can also be useful to retcon or head-cannon preferrable narratives or courses of action/sequence.
For example, one can pretend that half of the unnecessary dialogue hasn't happened, while maintaining the necessary stuff. You're basically retaining the cliff notes version as head canon, an if you WANT you can go back and retcon/rewrite a better story, but obvious gaffes and poorly executed this that and the other aside, so far this one is shaping up to be the first fic that is enjoyable on it's face.

Anyway, they're literally about to explain why turning a profit is important. This is like when someone is doing a video breakdown of a thing, describing shit in detail, but they keep stopping the video to complain about how 'this' doesnt make sense for 5 minutes, when 20 seconds after the pause the thing is explained or seen to make sense after all.
Not saying it is ALWAYS the case, just saying this is one. Low hanging fruit, my dude

>>376223
>you might enjoy he story a bit more if you didnt seem to be looking so hard for reasons to not enjoy it.
I wouldn't say I'm looking for reasons to not enjoy the story. Overall I think my assessment of this thing has skewed surprisingly positive, in fact I'm finding it to be much better written than I was expecting. Anyway, enjoyment isn't really the objective here; the whole point is to analyze the story and critique it, which involves being a little more nitpicky than I would be if I were just reading it for fun.

>when one reads fanfiction with the intent of enjoying it, they can ignore, skip over, and disregard unnecessary shit. Case in point, I completely glossed over the description of place and filed it under "Yeah, yeah, its old and dingy like the rest of everything."
>It can also be useful to retcon or head-cannon preferrable narratives or courses of action/sequence.
>For example, one can pretend that half of the unnecessary dialogue hasn't happened, while maintaining the necessary stuff. You're basically retaining the cliff notes version as head canon, an if you WANT you can go back and retcon/rewrite a better story, but obvious gaffes and poorly executed this that and the other aside, so far this one is shaping up to be the first fic that is enjoyable on it's face.
So in other words, I should just pretend I'm reading a better story?

>This is like when someone is doing a video breakdown of a thing, describing shit in detail, but they keep stopping the video to complain about how 'this' doesnt make sense for 5 minutes, when 20 seconds after the pause the thing is explained or seen to make sense after all.
Fair enough. I do tend to do this a lot.

>>376222

Anyway, as Anon predicted, Bottlecap goes on to explain that there are separate divisions within the Finders, and they have differing philosophies on how business ought to be conducted. Apparently, Bottlecap's father is the leader, or founder, or something, and his three daughters each head a division. The sisters don't see eye to eye on how to run things: Bottlecap's sister Caprice apparently is involved in drugs and prostitution as well as arms dealing, and does not seem to have any objective beyond amassing as large a fortune as she can. Bottlecap's view is more forward-thinking: she wants to facilitate better trade relations in the wasteland.

The whole thing still doesn't make a ton of sense. Bottlecap's view is reasonable enough: she basically wants to reestablish some semblance of civilization based on mutually beneficial trade agreements. Caprice, again, is just trying to amass a large fortune, which in this setting means possessing a huge number of caps. To its credit, the text acknowledges that this is silly:

>“What would be the point of having a pile of caps? To swim in it?” Bottlecap said with a smile as she dug out one of the caps and held it up. “This is just a stamped piece of metal. What matters is trade. Taking goods for caps. Selling goods and getting caps. The amount of caps doesn’t matter compared to the trade. If anything has a chance of holding us together, it’s trade. After all, everypony wants something.”
Unfortunately, all this really does is emphasize how screwy and illogical this setting's economic system really is. Bottlecap correctly observes that the caps themselves are worthless; they're just a medium of exchange. This is essentially what money is in any economic system. However, the problem is that in order for this to work, the exchange tokens need to either have actual value in themselves, or else be issued by someone who can guarantee their value.

The bottlecap system in FoE essentially works like a fiat currency, except it's not issued by anyone and there's nothing backing it, which doesn't make any sense. Fiat currency only works in a situation where there is some kind of central authority guaranteeing the value of the exchange medium. In a state of anarchy like the Wasteland, there is no authority that can guarantee the value of caps, and they have no value in and of themselves, so it makes no sense that they are being used as money in the first place.

Using bullets as currency units, for instance, would make sense in a setting like this. Ammunition is something that everyone needs and can use, but at the same time is scarce. Individual bullets are also small and easy to portion out, so it would be easy enough to denominate the value of items in terms of bullets. Alternatively, the system that Nigel mentioned earlier, where the caps represent a certain quantity of water, would also work; however, the water would have to be held in trust by whoever is issuing the caps.

Somber has stumbled upon a deep flaw present in kkat's canon, but at the same time makes no effort to correct it. Goods have inherent value: you can eat food, you can drink water, you can shoot bullets. However, you can't do anything with bottle caps. If you had a pound of rice but no beans, and your neighbor had a pound of beans and no rice, then it would make sense to exchange rice for beans. However, exchanging rice or beans for bottlecaps makes no sense at all since you can't use them. Nobody is going to trade something of value for something of no value. There is no plausible reason why ponies would have all spontaneously started using bottlecaps for money.

My guess is the problem just stems from a basic ignorance of economics, as well as kkat's clumsy 1:1 transpositions of equally-clumsy Fallout 3 lore into his setting. Both kkat and Somber have presumably lived their entire lives in a fiat system and have never really given much thought to how all of it works: a candy bar or a computer or a ten gallon drum of anal lube are all valued in dollars, and that's just how it works. As to what exactly a dollar is or what determines it's value, they don't know; it's just the thing that everyone uses as a basic unit to buy stuff. Nothing we can do except chalk it up to a failure of the American public school system and move on.

Anywho, the conversation segues into the now-tired subject of violence, and how and when it ought to be used. Blackjack recounts the now-tired story of how she murdered forty orphans, and Bottlecap basically tells her it's okay because there was nothing else she could have done about it. In an effort to make BJ feel better, she acknowledges that, by acting as a brokerage service between bounty hunters and bounties, she has facilitated the deaths of many ponies herself.

From here, she segues into an infodump about her other sister, Usury, who apparently runs the slave market in these parts.

> “Usury believed it was a mistake to ignore the slave market. That ponies are every bit as much a commodity as salvage or sex.”
Here, the author stumbles into yet another logic issue in this setting. If ponies are a "commodity," it implies they have some value as slaves. Who exactly are the end users of the slaves being sold? What do slaves do and why are they needed?

In the original, this question was resolved when it was revealed that the slaves were not being sold so much as rounded up by Red Eye in order to build...whatever the fuck he was building; a city or a temple or something. However, we've heard no mention of him here yet, and in any case my understanding was that he had his own network of slavers and would thus have no reason to buy them from a third party like Usury. For a slave economy to make sense, there would need to be productive work that requires a huge workforce. The average Wastelander would have no use for a slave; it would just be another mouth to feed.

>>376226
While Bottlecap's breakdown of the economic structure doesnt pass the scratch n sniff test, it does a few things acceptably well.
I doubt anyone could come up with a both hypothetical AND cohesive economic structure that makes sense, and ngl I liked the unspoken parallel between worthless dollars ostensibly linked to gold/oil, and worhless caps ostensiby linked to clean water. Probably not what Somber was goi for, but Imo it worked anyway.
Additionaly, it seems that - again similar to dollars and fiat - caps were chosen as a currency because they are consistent and plentiful. Caps dont have value because of intrinsic value, try have value because enough of them represent goods and commodities in the possession of wealthier parties and what goods they will exchange. If this is the case, then caps are a non-governmentally issued fiat currency, backed by the bullets of ponies who represent lots and lots of bullets.
It isnt a perfect explanation, but what would be? Again, Somber appears to be taking the path of least resistance while alluding to (what I intuit to be a trend for this story) the elusive "Not the morality that Fequestria wants, but he morality that it deseres".

A seeming consistency of both FoE stories is a more or less ham-fisted 'loss of innocence' narrative. Without going into LP, Somber appears to be trying to give BJ something resembling an evolving mentality that is burdened by he less-ideal actions that are (unfortunately) necessitated by the apparently increasingly less-ideal world that she is exposed to.
Stuart, make a meme of BJ with a caption "If only you knew how bad things really are"
Not that kind of BJ!
But in both cases - regardless their 'potential' - they both come from a naive context where if not for outside circumstances they might still be truckin away more or less contentedly in the stable. They both weren't SUPPOSED to be murder hobos, but thats what the story/necessity calls for. And while it irks that BJ keeps havimg her "I killed children" moments, at least she is morally conflicted in the run up to complete sociopathy, versus LP that was just waiting for he right trigger

>>376225
>So in other words, I should just pretend I'm reading a better story?
I mean,... not when you're doing a review thread, but when casually reading, sure.

>>376226

>“Like I said, Megamart is losing trade. More and more ponies go to Paradise and Flank instead of here to exchange goods.
The logic doesn't track here, either. Paradise (run by Caprice) is just Megamart + prostitution and drugs, and Flank (run by Usury) is just Megamart + slaves. If you only need guns or ammunition, which is probably what 99.9% of Wastelanders need in most situations most of the time, you could get them just as easily at any of these three convenient Megamart locations, so there's no reason to prefer one over the other. Unless you're either horny or a junkie in need of a fix, you've got no reason in particular to go to Paradise, and unless you're the owner of a large cotton plantation, you've got no reason to go to Flank. For everypony else, price and proximity would be the only serious factors, so unless Bottlecap's sisters are somehow seriously undercutting her in terms of price, I don't see how either of them would have a serious advantage.

>I looked at Bottlecap for the longest time, feeling odd emotions churning inside me. Respect… no. Admiration. Here was a pony that had lived in the Wasteland her entire life and refused to sell out her integrity. Even when it hurt her business, she insisted on doing the right thing. I didn’t really think it was possible for businesses to care more about their effects than wealth.
The sisters generate quick returns and high profit margins by engaging in morally dubious practices, while Bottlecap adheres to a more principled model despite getting undercut. The premise is similar to that episode of the show, where Applejack has to defend her old-timey cider production methods against Flim and Flam's mechanized process that sacrifices quality for efficiency. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work here, again due to this world's screwy and poorly thought out economics.

The problem with Edgequestria is that it's presented as world of complete anarchy, but at the same time parts of it still inexplicably function like there's a central authority structure in place that imposes law and order. Some of it, again, is kkat's fault. Issues like how or why bottlecaps came to be used as currency despite having no value, or how a value-added consumer economy like Tenpony Tower would operate in the Wasteland, are never addressed by kkat. Somber, however, makes no effort to explain any of it either, he just takes kkat's nonsensical setting at face value and runs with it.

Also, the existence of Megamart as an enterprise doesn't make a ton of sense to begin with. This place is basically just a gigantic marketplace stocked from floor to ceiling with guns and ammunition, but as far as I can tell Bottlecap doesn't have any serious security. If she had an army or something, or the building was at least well-fortified enough to hold off an invasion, that would be one thing. But, from what we've seen so far, it's just being run like an ordinary, modern store. On her first visit, BJ even observes raiders walking around shopping with everyone else. We've seen how raiders normally behave; what's to stop them from just taking whatever they want and murdering anyone who gets in their way? Why even sell weapons to raiders in the first place? They're just going to use them to cause trouble, including disrupting Megamart's own caravans. For that matter, what's stopping Red Eye or The Enclave or the Steel Rangers or some other well-organized faction from just busting in here, taking whatever they want, and leveling Bottlecap's operation to the ground? The whole thing makes very little sense.

Anyway, it appears that Bottlecap's commitment to ethical post-apocalyptic business practices has stirred Blackjack's justice boner. She asks Bottlecap if there is anything she can do to help bust up Usury's operation. Bottlecap informs her that she has already helped out by killing the slavers earlier, and the most helpful course of action would be to continue disrupting her sister's supply lines wherever possible.

To her credit, she also addresses the issue of who exactly is buying all of these slaves:

>But, eventually, you’ll have to tackle the demand. Some, like Red Eye in Fillydelphia, probably wouldn’t stop unless he died. But there are others, like Brimstone's Fall, where the slave operations are smaller and more manageable.
It's still not clear exactly how these slaves are being used or to what purpose, but we'll put a pin in that for now. I'm assuming we'll find out eventually.

Anyway, Bottlecap explains that she can't formally hire her to fuck with her sister's operation, because it would cause all out war within the Finders and blah blah blah. BJ accepts this, and asks if she has any other contracts available, and the scene ends in a page break.

We rejoin BJ after she has been given her new contracts. Her next tasks will involve "patrolling" the highway between Megamart and Flank, delivering some mail (???) and foraging for electronic parts at some kind of abandoned air-force base.

>Unlike my first talk with Watcher, I didn’t feel much more confident.
This sentence is bad and you should feel bad.

Anyway, it's not clear where exactly she is in the building; presumably, she is still in Bottlecap's personal apartments somewhere. But, on her way out from wherever she is, she encounters some ponies playing cards, and asks them to deal her in. She plays for a couple hours, and seems to do pretty well for herself. It was established earlier that her cutie mark is related to gambling, though it hasn't come up very often.

>Then, of course, there was the whiskey. I had to admit that I’d never really drunk before.
I've been wondering when she was going to start drinking. Virtually all the memes I've seen of this character depict her as some kind of alcoholic sex-fiend, but she's been pretty sober thus far. Also: the second sentence is grammatically incorrect; it should either read "I'd never really been drunk before," or "I'd never really drank before."

>>376229
>I doubt anyone could come up with a both hypothetical AND cohesive economic structure that makes sense, and ngl I liked the unspoken parallel between worthless dollars ostensibly linked to gold/oil, and worhless caps ostensiby linked to clean water. Probably not what Somber was goi for, but Imo it worked anyway.
Neither FoE nor PH establishes, or even implies, that the caps are linked to water or anything else; that's my whole problem with it. Maybe the idea is that they're supposed to be, and this is just one of those areas where the author(s) assume that most readers have played the Fallout games and would connect the dots for themselves. However, if you take the text at face value, the caps are not backed by anything and there is no issuing authority, so I maintain that they make absolutely no sense as currency.

>Additionaly, it seems that - again similar to dollars and fiat - caps were chosen as a currency because they are consistent and plentiful. Caps dont have value because of intrinsic value, try have value because enough of them represent goods and commodities in the possession of wealthier parties and what goods they will exchange. If this is the case, then caps are a non-governmentally issued fiat currency, backed by the bullets of ponies who represent lots and lots of bullets.
I don't claim to be an expert on the finer points of economics, and maybe I'm out of my depth here, but this still doesn't make any sense to me. For something to become a medium of exchange, it needs to either have inherent value, or be issued by some kind of trusted third party, like a bank or a government. I can't visualize how or why ponies living in a post-apocalyptic, trustless world would just arbitrarily start using worthless, unbacked tokens as money. If I have a wagon full of oats, and some griffon stops by and offers to buy my oats in exchange for a bag full of bottlecaps, I can't imagine agreeing to such a trade without some guarantee that the caps are redeemable for something.

>It isnt a perfect explanation, but what would be?
That's...basically my point.

>>376230
>A seeming consistency of both FoE stories is a more or less ham-fisted 'loss of innocence' narrative. Without going into LP, Somber appears to be trying to give BJ something resembling an evolving mentality that is burdened by he less-ideal actions that are (unfortunately) necessitated by the apparently increasingly less-ideal world that she is exposed to.
I've noticed this too. The basic idea is that this relatively innocent character is suddenly taken out of the relatively safe world she's grown up in, and is placed in a rougher environment where right and wrong are not clearly defined. She will need to make difficult choices about whether to kill in the name of a higher ideal, or to refuse to kill and in so doing allow something worse to persist. The situation with the foals earlier was the first of what I am assuming will be a long chain of similar choices.

>>376236

Anywho, BJ plays cards and gets crunk. Suddenly, she notices that U-21, that shifty ol' so-and-so from earlier who helped sell out Stable 99 to the invaders, is for some reason lurking in the background. She excuses herself from the game, and runs off to have a word with him.

She chases him down...an aisle? I think? The author has done a piss-poor job of establishing time and space in this scene. I think the basic idea is that it's still nighttime, the Megamart is closed, and as such the place is empty except for a few of Bottlecap's employees playing cards, and U-21 for some reason.

At any rate, she chases and corners him. However, it turns out that his appearance was just a clever ruse:

>“Hello, Security Cunt.” In the stable, he’d looked big. Now, he looked huge. Even ignoring the metal plates fused to his hide and the pistons supporting his weight, he stood a whole head higher than me. The sight of metal plunging into flesh, distorting it as he moved, would normally have turned my stomach. Just at the moment, though, I had enough sobriety to notice but more than enough inebriation to not care about it. Or that I was dangling helplessly between his massive guns. “You have no idea how aggravating it’s been to find you.”
Apparently, Deus is here too. This scene is making less and less sense the further it progresses. This guy is fucking enormous; how did he get in here after hours without being spotted? Or, maybe a better question would be, if Bottlecap's security is this bad, how is she even still operating?

Unfortunately, things only get wackier from here. Blackjack is drunk, and based on the quality of writing I assume that Somber was in a similar state when he wrote this. I'll do my best to summarize.

Deus has been tracking BJ for the past week, because his employer Sanguine still wants to get his hooves on macguffin.exe. U-21 lured her out here into this ambush, and is now using his magical unicorn powers to hold her in place so Deus can remove her PipBuck. However, Blackjack...I guess...uses her own unicorn powers to...fire Deus's guns...somehow...which destroys a bunch of shelves...I think...distracting U-21 and causing him to drop her. Then...I guess...she somehow uses her unicorn magic to operate one of the giant turrets mounted in the store's ceiling. Either that, or the explosion caused the turret to fire on Deus automatically. I honestly have no idea what the fuck is even going on at this point. Here is exactly what the text says:

>“Wrath of Gun,” I muttered, and then he looked up. The massive turret was swinging the barrel around to point right at Deus. He stepped back, eyes widening, and I curled up as tightly as I could, giggling, “Mine’s bigger.” Gun fired.
Yeah, your guess is as good as mine. I'm not even sure Somber is writing in English anymore.

Anyway, the blast from...whatever the fuck just happened...apparently sends Blackjack flying. She crash-lands behind some kind of firearms counter, which is amply provisioned with various guns and boxes of ammo. She loads up a couple of the guns and stumbles away.

Meanwhile, that automated turret is apparently still tracking Deus, but isn't shooting at him for some reason. However, it seems the previous blast has blown off one of the cannons that are mounted to his body or whatever. He is stumbling around, but still manages to fire his other cannon at Blackjack, which narrowly misses her...I think? Fuck, this scene is giving me a headache.

Blackjack shoots Deus with the gun she grabbed from behind the counter, and he suddenly explodes, because it turns out the gun she grabbed was actually a grenade launcher. However, despite having just exploded, he is somehow still alive and in one piece.

>Unfortunately Deus was not a dead pony. He wasn’t a happy pony either. Actually, looking around, there were a lot of unhappy ponies. Well, not me. I was happy. I had a tummy of whiskey residue and my head was going around and around and whee.
I have no commentary here, I just wanted to force you all to read these words so I don't have to suffer alone.

Anyway, Morning Glory and P-21 suddenly show up out of absolutely fucking nowhere, and begin feeding Blackjack healing potions. Apparently, she was seriously injured and didn't realize it due to intoxication. Then, Bottlecap shows up, flanked by what laughably passes for her security team. She and Deus exchange a few words; Deus offers to buy Blackjack from Bottlecap, and Bottlecap tells him that Blackjack isn't for sale. Deus screams "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" at the top of his lungs, fires a rocket out of his butthole, and blasts himself off to the fucking moon because that makes about as much sense as anything else that's going on. Well, not exactly, but close. This is what actually happens:

>He glanced up and around, then scowled. “Fine. But I got one last piece of business here.” He pointed his hoof at me and yelled, “Bounty on Security. Fifty thousand caps. You want to collect, bring her head and her PipBuck -- intact -- to the Arena! If she’s alive, one hundred thousand bottlecaps! Usury will back me up on payment. After all, she’s the sister who doesn’t give a fuck,” he added, sneering down at Bottlecap. He grinned at me one final time and then the cybernetic pony walked for the exit. U-21 limped after him, smirking at me with malicious glee.
>Suddenly more ponies were glancing at me and muttering to each other.
So...Deus just put out a bounty on Blackjack? I guess? And apparently some of the other customers in the store, who are here for some reason despite it being like 3 o'clock in the morning and the store having been empty earlier, are considering taking him up on it? I guess? I honestly have no idea anymore.

Anyway, Deus, his body still remarkably intact despite having just exploded, leaves the Megamart. BJ's friends carry her off to the medical tent to have her injuries treated, and this goddamned ridiculous scene mercifully ends in a page break.

>>376238

>Deus had come in like any shopper and simply waited, knowing that I’d arrive eventually to collect on my contracts. Now that there was a price on my head, Keystone and Bottlecap had thought it best I recover out of sight before I started a riot. Without putting up a single piece of paper, Deus had created the largest bounty in Hoofington history. And that was me dead; me alive was twice as much.
So, apparently what happened is this gigantic murderous cyborg just walked into the Megamart and loitered there, waiting for Blackjack to show up, and none of Bottlecap's security personnel noticed he was there. Makes about as much sense as anything else I suppose. This world operates according to its own logic.

Anywho, BJ is back in Bottlecap's office again. As there is now a preposterously huge bounty on her head, Bottlecap thought it best to get BJ off of the sales floor to keep the customers from trying to capture her. Because, even though 100,000 caps is more money than most Wastelanders see in their entire lifetime, that "Staff Only" sign on Bottlecap's office door is not to be taken lightly.

Keystone, the security mare with whom BJ was playing cards earlier, returns her barding. It now has armor plates inside it, which should hopefully offer her some additional protection. We also learn that Deus, in addition to being a Reaper, is also one of "Big Daddy's Four Horses of the Apocalypse," and he can be found at the Hoofington Sports Arena.

>I looked over at Bottlecap. “So I’m guessing those jobs are going to be on hold for a while?”
>The lemon mare smiled. “Why? Your bounty doesn’t disqualify you from getting paid for other jobs. Every trade hub is supposed to be neutral ground, and you can send Glory or P-21 in to collect payments. Just be careful. That is a lot of money for a bounty, and I know many ponies won’t care if you’re Security or not.”
Apparently, the Megamart is considered "neutral ground," and that appears to be the closest thing to an explanation that we are likely to get for why everyone behaves themselves in here, and why nobody ever tries to attack the place despite the worthless security team and complete lack of defenses. This world operates according to its own logic.

Anyway, the chapter ends here.

>Footnote: Level Up.
>New Perk: Quick Draw - Holstering and drawing weapons is 50% faster.
>Quest Perk: The Stare (Level 1) - You can intimidate non-hostile contacts through eye contact.

Chapter 8: Long Roads

>Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
>By Somber
>Chapter 8: Long Roads

Today's fortune cookie:
>“Are you sayin’ my mouth is makin’ promises my legs can't keep?”

It appears that word of the ridiculously large bounty has spread. There is now a small army camped outside the Megamart, waiting for Blackjack to emerge so they can capture her.

>By morning the next day, Megamart found itself inundated with ‘customers’. Keystone made sure every one of them paid the toll, and even restricted weapons in case Gun wasn’t enough deterrent.
Minor note: "Gun" is actually the nickname of the giant automated turret that was shooting at Deus earlier. This is a minor detail that was established awhile ago that I'd forgotten about. At least some of the confusion in the previous scene stems from my failing to understand that "Gun" was being used as a proper noun. I guess my only advice here is that if you're going to do something like this, you might want to give your turret a somewhat more memorable nickname that won't cause confusion. There are a lot of guns in this story.

Anywho, our intrepid trio manages to escape disguised as a caravan leading a herd of cattle. I guess Bottlecap and some of the security team goes with them. They are stopped by some of the bounty hunters, and a confusing and poorly-written exchange follows, which isn't worth going into. Yada yada yada, they make it past them unscathed.

They are now at Pony Joe's, the diner where the raiders were hiding out earlier. They stop and remove their disguises, and yak for a bit. The conversation is also not worth going over, with the exception of a few tidbits of information:

>The truth was that I couldn’t really do magic. Oh, I could levitate guns and swing batons as well as any unicorn, but my telekinesis was hardly all that impressive. In medical they concluded that my magic hadn’t fully developed yet.
I think this was mentioned once or twice before, but apparently Blackjack is magic-retarded.

We also learn something about Reapers:
>“There’s always been Reapers around Hoofington, but most aren’t as strong as Deus. When you become a Reaper they do something to you, make you stronger and tougher. But the oldest Reapers like Big Daddy and Deus have potent internal healing talismans and the like; the only ponies that come close to challenging their firepower are the Steel Rangers.”

It also appears that the Steel Rangers are planning...something:
>“Steel Rangers have the Ironmare naval station. The HMS Celestia’s tied up there. If they get the guns working on that ship, they’ll be able to lob shells across half of Hoofington. They’ve got numbers and ammo and they’re stocking up on every missile they can get their hooves on.” Bottlecap looked to the east, but highlands to the north and east of us blocked our view. “Most Steel Rangers just worry about stockpiling weapons and technology from the past. I’m pretty sure ‘Star Paladin’ Steel Rain plans on something bigger. Fortunately, the Reapers love to pick fights from the west and the Enclave has them bottled up from the south, leaving them mostly stuck in Ironmare.”

Anyway, we now learn that Morning Glory did not travel with the caravan, but had left earlier on her own so she could get to Pony Joe's before them. It's not clear why she did this. Also, the blood and guts and whatnot left behind by the raiders has been mysteriously cleaned up. BJ assumes that MG was responsible; however, MG denies it. I'm not sure if we're supposed to take her at her word or not.

>>376236
>The problem with Edgequestria is that it's presented as world of complete anarchy, but at the same time parts of it still inexplicably function like there's a central authority structure in place that imposes law and order.
Ostensibly because "nature abhors a power vacuum", and powerful non-gov entities/factions filled in the gaps. Part of the essence of money is an agreement to - in some cases - no kill one another outright. Money tends to fuction as an incentive to sometimes play nice - the carrot if you will - but why would one or more ponies with really big sticks NOT impose some degree of 'order' befitting them and whoever affiliates?
>If she had an army or something, or the building was at least well-fortified enough to hold off an invasion, that would be one thing. But, from what we've seen so far, it's just being run like an ordinary, modern store.
Hard to say wether this was an oversight, or if this might be leading up to Bottlecap gettig merc'd later on. Its premature to call Bottlecap a mentor, but BJ is pretty impresse so far a we all know what has to happen to mentors. If BC doesnt get raided, I'll just pencil in a suitable guard/workforce, but Im holding out for tragic bla bla.
Incidentally, a guard presence would impress a greater sense of urgency for BC to keep her numbers/commerce up.
As far as the caps go, the best I can come up with is that IF we allow that the caps have the slightest value - again pstensibly via the water potential (or other fluid I suppose,... estrus?) - then we can assume the caps are probably the lowest value of object that can be said to have value.
As such, this would seem to make it an optimal method for exchange, because it allows a more precise indication of value. Trade works great when a sack of potatoes has equal value to a bottle of whiskey, or when the sum total of trade goods can be said to be comparable, but when here is extreme variance of the value of goods, an intermediary currency becomes necessary.
I agree, bullets DOES make more sense and WOULD have worked better, but spilled milk.

>>376238
>Either that, or the explosion caused the turret to fire on Deus automatically. I honestly have no idea what the fuck is even going on at this point.
I think BJ fired one of Duce's guns, causing the automated turret to automate all over Duce's ass. Incidentally, an automated turret lends credence to why BC hasnt gotten mercd yet.
>I have no commentary here, I just wanted to force you all to read these words so I don't have to suffer alone
Somber writes drunk ponies like someone who hasnt been drunk thinks it is like to be drunk.

>>376239

Anyway, I guess BJ is radioactive or something again, so she goes into the bathroom to take a shit and chug some more RadAway. After that, she puts on her new armor and heads back to the dining area.

Morning Glory is in the middle of giving instructions to Bottlecap; apparently she has some slides or medical samples or something, and Bottlecap is going to deliver them somewhere for her. Someone named Dr. Morningstar is supposed to receive them. She then announces that she intends to continue traveling with Blackjack, because apparently that was in doubt. After that, they saddle up and head out.

>“So did your brains tell you anything?” I asked her, half teasing.
I guess she dissected those raider brains she collected at some point. Maybe that's why she came to Pony Joe's early? To dissect brains in the kitchen? I have no idea. This world operates according to its own logic.

Anyway, MG's research apparently found that raiders have lesions in the part of their brain that governs impulse control and long-term decision making. She hypothesizes that there is some kind of virus or bacteria that causes this, and ponies who succumb to it turn into raiders. She also believes it may spread from bites. Presumably the brain lesions would account for the pointless murder and defecation that raiders are all so fond of. I'll toss Somber a couple of points here for thinking up a plausible explanation for one of the goofiest aspects of kkat's setting.

From Pony Joe's they travel back to Weather Station 4, where they proceed to nap amongst the foal skeletons. Before she goes to sleep, BJ decides to have a look at a memory orb she picked up from somewhere at some point. Apparently she found it at the gazebo by the lake, though I'm afraid I've completely forgotten which gazebo and which lake she's referring to.

The memory belongs to a unicorn named Maripony, who is betrothed to Big Macintosh. The two of them are at a gazebo by a lake (I'm assuming this is the same gazebo/lake combination that the orb came from), saying goodbye to each other. Big Mac has to go...somewhere. Back to the war, I guess. The implication seems to be that this conversation took place shortly before Big Mac was killed; if I remember correctly, he died protecting Princess Celestia from being assassinated. The scene is brief; they say their goodbyes and Big Mac exits. We also learn that Maripony is pregnant with his child. I seem to recall "Maripony" also being the name of a significant location in the first story, so this may end up being important later on.

Blackjack wakes up from the memory, full of emotions and whatnot. She asks P-21 about Big Mac and we receive confirmation that he did indeed die protecting Princess Celestia from assassination. Blackjack goes outside to stare pensively at the rain, presumably while a Sarah McLaughlin song plays in the background.

They set out again the next day. It is still raining, though not as hard as before. BJ spies a nearby hill, and decides to climb it to see if she can get an idea of how many bounty hunters are chasing after them. As they climb the hill, her PipBuck informs her that it is called Hill 255. Then, suddenly, this happens:

>Suddenly there was a metallic groan beneath us. The entire hillside started to slide out from underneath our hooves. Glory took to the skies as I wrapped my magic around P-21’s leg and we scrambled to the side.
>To my amazement a vast metal shape turned over as it breached the water-drenched surface. Slowly it came to a stop behind us, and I stared at the mud-slathered turret of a two-hundred-year-old tank. Around it and beneath it, poking from the slumping mud, were hundreds of rotten bones freed from the earth.
Apparently, a major battle took place here.

Anyway, she scans the horizon with her binoculars, and notes the position of the throng of bounty hunters. She works out a route that she thinks will avoid them, and the three of them continue on their way. BJ decides to switch on the radio as she walks, and naturally the DJ is talking about her.

>Well, if you were listening earlier you probably heard Security Mare’s little declaration of war against Paradise Mall. It looks like Paradise has responded in kind by putting a big bounty on Security.
Couple of things here. First off: was the confrontation scene between Deus and BJ somehow being broadcast on the radio? Because if not, I'm not sure how anyone would have "heard Security Mare’s little declaration of war." Maybe I'm just taking it too literally, and the implication is really just that news of the incident has spread by word of mouth. However, earlier, the DJ somehow got hold of an actual recording of Blackjack yelling at the slavers, so there's a chance that someone, Frank maybe, is spying on her and sending recordings to the DJ. It would help if the author would clarify which it is.

Second, what's the deal with Paradise Mall? How does this fit into the equation? When he offered the bounty, Deus instructed anyone interested in claiming it to bring BJ's head and PipBuck to the Arena (location unknown at this point), and that Usury would guarantee payment. Nobody said anything about Paradise Mall.

From the conversation earlier, we know that Bottlecap has two sisters: Caprice and Usury. Caprice runs a drug and prostitution racket out of Paradise, which presumably contains a mall, and Usury operates a slave market in Flank. If Deus had said Caprice was backing the bounty than the DJ's mention of Paradise would make sense. However, Caprice was not mentioned, and neither was Paradise. BJ did not declare war on Paradise or its Mall, and the bounty is guaranteed by Usury, who lives in Flank. So, I'm not really sure what the DJ is on about here.

Anyway the DJ follows this up with her usual babble about "doing the right thing" and advises her listeners not to be swayed by the temptation of easy money. Then, she segues into some old song by Sweetie Belle.

>>376257

>For the first time, I was starting to warm a little to the DJ. I had to agree, making me out to be a hero was annoyingly helpful, but it was good to hear anypony arguing against fifty thousand caps for my head. I just wish he’d got it right that it was Deus that made the bounty… though on second thought that bastard would probably enjoy it. It also explained why so many hunters were watching every inch between Megamart and Manehattan: if DJ Pon3 was in my corner, maybe I was running there now.
Maybe the implication is that the DJ got some wrong information, and Paradise actually has nothing to do with anything? I honestly don't know. This world operates according to its own logic.

Anywho, as they are walking, they suddenly hear gunshots. They go to investigate, and discover a bunch of armed assailants laying siege to some kind of metal bunker. P-21 advises they simply mind their own business and go around, but BJ is not really into that. She approaches what appears to be the commander and asks him what's going on. He informs her that a group of Crusaders have been rustling their cattle, and they're now holed up in this bunker. BJ suggests that maybe a wandering radigator could have been responsible for the disappearing cattle, and the commando acknowledges that this is possible. He then recognizes the infamous "Security Mare." Guessing at his thoughts, BJ recommends not trying to collect on the bounty as he would most likely not survive the attempt. The commando then agrees to leave the Crusaders alone, and reluctantly moves on. P-21 seems to believe that this will not be the end of the incident.

BJ approaches the bunker and convinces the foals that they are no longer in danger. They emerge, and one of them, of course, recognizes her as Security. There is a brief argument over whether or not they should attempt to capture her for themselves, though it does not seem to be serious. It also seems that several of the foals are aware of the incident with Scoodle earlier, and as such they don't trust BJ. This goes back and forth for quite some time. Ultimately, BJ apologizes for getting Scoodle killed, and the foals explain that they have been unjustly framed as cattle rustlers. Apparently, some mutated dragons somewhere up in the hills are the ones who are actually responsible for the cattle disappearing. Easy mistake to make; I get foals and mutated dragons mixed up all the time.

Anyway, this whole situation has absolutely fuck-all to do with BJ and her group, and they have nothing to gain from getting involved. So, naturally, they volunteer to hunt down the mutated dragons and restore peace between the cattle farmers and the children. The scene ends in a page break.

We rejoin them a short time later. They are up in some hill country above the cattle farm, where the dragons are supposed to live.

>I dropped carefully into the crevasse, sliding down ten or twenty feet. Glory carried P-21 down with her. I didn’t like him going in unarmed, but that was nothing new.
Why is he unarmed exactly? Seems like they've collected quite a few weapons by now, plus they were just at Megamart and are flush with caps from the contracts they've completed. I get that he's more of a support specialist and not a fighter, but you'd think they'd have at least fixed him up with a basic pistol or something so he could defend himself. Also: is his leg still broken, or injured, or whatever? I haven't heard mention of it being healed, and BJ was protecting it with magic earlier. Seems like that's also something they ought to have taken care of by now.

Anyway, they descend into the crevasse and go exploring. There is some mild radioactivity in here, but MG gives them each a shot of some kind of radiation-repellant, so they don't need to worry about it. The dragons turn out to be the small, Spike-sized type of dragon rather than the large terrifying variety; however, they are also clearly vicious and non-sentient, so BJ decides it's okay to kill them.

They dispatch the two small dragons they encounter quickly enough, but another, slightly larger, one emerges. They take that one out, and then a few more appear. And so on in this fashion, until most of the red bars have been cleared away.

>Then I noticed P-21 sneaking closer to the dragons and tossing two mines out in the middle of their path. Why was he carrying mines?
Is there any particular reason he shouldn't be carrying them?

Well, it appears that we are about to find out:

>I slugged down a healing potion and then turned to look coolly at P-21. “Okay, Mr. I-don’t-trust-myself-with-guns. What are you doing with mines?”
Oh, okay, I think I understand why he doesn't have a gun. I guess he still has some kind of yet-unexplained grudge against Blackjack, and he doesn't trust himself not to shoot her in the back because reasons, so he chooses to go unarmed. This world operates according to its own logic.

Anyway, it turns out that, since he doesn't carry a gun, he's stocked up on various types of mines, bombs, explosives and what-have-you so that he isn't completely defenseless. Glad we got that little mystery cleared up.

The party advances deeper into the caves. The radiation levels appear to be increasing, but BJ wants to be thorough and make sure she kills all the dragons before she leaves. They come across some kind of concrete storage bunker. Then, another dragon charges them, but P-21 lobs a stick of dynamite at it. In typical FoE fashion, the explosion kills the dragon but has no effect on the surrounding environment.

BJ checks her PipBuck, and observes that all the red bars are gone except for one. So, it looks like they just have one last straggler to kill, and then they can go on about their business. Unfortunately, in true FoE fashion, the last dragon turns out to be the largest and most terrifying of the bunch.

>>376259

>It was crawling towards us, making the bunker shake and sending rocks and pebbles raining down on us. I looked up. The ceiling was a mess of cracks and gaps. I grinned. “Wanna do something stupid?”
>P-21’s mouth hung open for a second. “Sure! Why not?” he said, throwing his hooves up in a shrug.
>“Use those explosives of yours to bring the roof down.”
Welp, it looks like in certain specific circumstances, explosive devices do impact the surrounding environment in FoE. Color me surprised.

Anyway, it looks like the current plan is to have P-21 plant some bombs in the ceiling to create a partial cave-in, thus destroying and/or trapping the dragon. However, he doesn't want to trap the party as well, so he needs to be precise about how he does it. For some reason or other he has a manual on him that explains how to do this, so he sits down to read while the rest of the crew distracts the dragon.

BJ loads up her automatic shotgun with the green ammunition, which I guess spews poison or something, and starts blasting it all over the dragon. It seems to have a disorienting effect, and impairs its movement somewhat. Meanwhile, P-21 runs around planting sticks of dynamite at key points in the ceiling. When he's finished, BJ uses telekinesis to trigger the dynamite, then everything kerplodes.

The dragon is now partially trapped under rubble, but apparently is not quite dead yet. So, BJ jams a piece of iron rebar into its eye, and then jams a grenade into the hole created by the rebar. Its eye kerplodes. Apparently, this doesn't kill it either. So, BJ does what any sensible pony in her situation would do: dives head-first into the dragon's empty eye socket and rapid-fires green poison rounds point-blank into its brain, until eventually it dies of...poison, I guess. Either that or the sheer ridiculousness of the situation just causes it to give up on life.

>Slowly I stepped out of the dragon’s skull. Blood and yellow vitreous fluids dripped from my security barding. My eyes glowed like mining lamps as I looked up at the farmers and Crusaders with a wide grin. “Now who wants to try and collect on that bounty?” I yelled up at them, waving my steaming shotgun overhead and laughing wildly into the rain.
Who says this fandom's literature is lacking in artistic taste?

Anywho, the dragon was apparently the source of all the radiation in the cave, or crevasse, or wherever the hell they are Somber's description of the environment has been sparse and confusing. Climbing into its eye seems to have given BJ a massive dose of radiation poisoning. However, it turns out that the farmers have a medic on staff, who is capable of fixing her up. At this point I am not even going to bother wondering about the specifics. Bottom line is, she is radioactive for like a paragraph, and then in the next paragraph she is cured. Righty-o.

Next, she has the cattle-ranchers apologize to the Crusaders for trying to kill them, and after that it's time to move on. As payment for her services, she has only one request: a pair of snazzy mirrored sunglasses that one of the ranchers was wearing. This rambling autism thankfully concludes with a page break.

We rejoin the party at some point in the future, in some unknown location. They appear to be in the company of the Crusaders, so maybe they're back in that steel bunker from earlier. The Crusaders are babbling to each other about all the cool stuff that BJ just did to the dragon.

In the course of the conversation, it is revealed that the nearby town of Paradise has its own short-range radio station that can be picked up from here. This is apparently how the Crusaders learned of the bounty on Blackjack. Out of curiosity, BJ switches on her PipBuck and tunes it to their station. The broadcast is some kind of bizarre talk-radio program, featuring the deranged ramblings of someone named Redbeard. It's probably easier if I just copypaste what he says directly:

> “…know what I think? I think it’s a scam, that’s what I think. We’ve got it pretty good around the Hoof. We got better tech, better food, better water, better everything. In bad times we’re on top. So what does Tenpony do? They dig up some cunt, dress her up, and send her here to stir up trouble. We already got Enclave poking their snouts where they don’t belong. We got Steel Raiders… oh, sorry. Rangers… threatening to blow up half the city. One outsider after the next coming here stirring up trouble.
>“And now Security. Either she’s a Manehattan thug with an itchy trigger horn, or she’s one of these brain-damaged stable ponies now out in the wide world and can’t help but fuck with us. This is our home! Our lives! She butchered Roses’s group, smashed her horn clean off, and then gave her a five second head start before siccing the goons on her. Oh, yeah, Security is all up in arms against bad things happening to ponies, unless you’re the pony she doesn’t like. Then she doesn’t give a fuck about you! That’s why I’m glad Usury didn't just back Deus’s bounty but matched it. The sooner this hypocrite is out of our manes, the better. So, someone put Security to rest and collect yourselves a hundred thousand caps. Or, better yet, give her skanky ass to Deus and double that! What do you say? What do you fucking say?!” The sound of cheering and stomping hooves answered him.
The main takeaway here seems to be that the bounty is now up to 200,000 caps, due to Usury promising to match the bounty that Deus had already promised.

Anyway, from here the text veers off into yet another tiresome conversation about the ethics of murder. It's just more of the usual fare: BJ is riddled with feelings of self-loathing and doubt over whether or not she did the right thing by killing all those slavers. P-21 then explains to her that she had every right to kill the slavers, because it was self-defense and they were slavers and so forth and so on.

>>376261
I can imagine that Sanguine faggot is probably manipulation events in the background because he really wants the MacGuffin file BJ has, but her rise to this level of fame and infamy in just a few days seems quite silly regardless. Excluding the previously mentioned plot reasons she's done little more than standard mercenary work. The only other thing I can think of is her encounter with the Crusaders before that, but that didn't really end in her favor since both she and the Crusaders think it's her fault Scoodle got ripped in half. Littlepoop had a similarly speedy rise to fame if I recall, so I'm not exactly surprised.

>>376261

There is also this interesting little tidbit:

>“Actually, Paradise does that. Slavers ain’t allowed to shoot slavers what have a Paradise license,” Medley offered with a smile. She received a number of dirty looks and the unicorn filly gave an injured, “What? They do!”
Apparently, in addition to having an unbacked fiat currency, Edgequestria also has a slavery licensing board. This world operates according to its own logic.

>“Anypony that takes a shot at us has forfeited any right to live, Blackjack. You have got to learn this!”
>“No!” I shouted back. “I can’t do that! I can’t just kill somepony because they’re red on my PipBuck.”
Okay, so just pick a different color on your PipBuck and kill them for being that. This is murder, not brain surgery.

Anyway, this now-tiresome schtick goes like this for several paragraphs, and then eventually it doesn't anymore. The upshot from all of this is that the age-old question of whether or not P-21 considers BJ a friend has been resolved: her status has been upgraded from not-friend to we're-probably-friends-I-guess. Hooray?

Page break. The party is now resting in some kind of drainage culvert or something. BJ awakens from a violent dream filled with >rape and murder, and decides to have a swig of whiskey. Keystone apparently gave her a bottle before they left Pony Joe's.

She gets her drank on, and then wanders out to where Morning Glory is keeping watch. MG is in the middle of recording an entry into some kind of audio diary. She details her observations of her teammates: Blackjack is a schizo, while P-21 seems full of incel rage despite being outwardly calm. As for herself, she confesses that so far, she's finding the Wasteland to be a lot more murdery than the pamphlets they gave her at Enclave-school had led her to believe. She's got PTSD and rape-trauma and so forth and so on.

Blackjack eavesdrops on her for awhile, then coughs politely and shows herself. She offers to take over the watch early so that MG can go to bed. She also asks if MG considers her a friend. MG responds that yes, she does. Blackjack now has two friends. Hooray?

BJ then notices some red blips on her PipBuck, so she goes to check it out. Apparently a few of the ranchers from earlier have been tailing her, and were planning to brain her in her sleep so they could collect the bounty. She confronts them. Not wanting to be responsible for any more needless death, she attempts to disarm and dissuade her attackers without actually killing any of them. However, it doesn't go as planned, and she accidentally beats one of them to death.

However, there's a silver lining: Morning Glory appears to have some kind of magical defibrillator, which she uses to resuscitate the dead unicorn. By now, P-21 is also awake, and comes charging out of the drainage culvert with a grenade in his mouth. The farmers grudgingly retreat, and that's the end of it. There is a bit of confusing and badly-written conversation, after which they all go back to bed. The chapter ends here.

>Footnote: Level Up.
>Skill Note: Melee (50)
>New Perk: Rad resistance - You resist 20% of radiation exposure. This makes you 20% cooler!

Chapter 9: Stone

>Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
>By Somber
>Chapter 9: Stone

Today's fortune cookie:
>“There was no talking. There was no smiling. There were only rocks.”
I can only assume that this is an excerpt from Maud Pie's autobiography.

The chapter opens with a long, rambling, multi-paragraph inner monologue from Blackjack. It mostly just retreads ground we've already covered many times: BJ has self esteem issues, she spends an excessive amount of time worrying about when and how it's ethically permissible to kill someone, she's worried about putting her friends in danger, etc etc etc.

>To top it all off, I had a mystery inside my PipBuck. A computer file that was apparently so valuable that my stable had been raided to retrieve it. It was encrypted. Finding out just what it was supposed to do was going to be likewise very expensive, yet it was the only reliable chance I had short of trusting the Enclave, which I wasn’t ready to do.
Why exactly doesn't she trust the Enclave again? I'm not sure we've ever been given a clear reason for this.

Anyway, when the monologue concludes, we rejoin the party in a classroom at someplace called Rosehoof Academy. The place appears to be another abandoned ruin patrolled by Robronco sentries. The automated sentries stopped them as they approached, apparently judged them to be truant students, and ordered them to report to the robot Principal's office for detention. I wish I was making this up.

The Principal is following lockdown protocols from 200 years ago. BJ plays along, pretending to be a student named Marigold, whose name she gets from a paper on the Principal's desk. The Principal wants to know why she was running around outside during lockdown, and "Marigold" explains that she wanted to make out with her boyfriend, so she left school to go find him. I wish I was making this up.

However, the Principal accepts her story. He gives them extra detention, and orders them to report to a different robot in a different room. He also gives them hall passes so the robo-drones won't vaporize them.
[YouTube] XL-K Hall Monitor [Embed]

>Thus the seven of us became the newest students of Roosehoof Academy. “That was brilliant!” Glory gushed as we trotted by Robronco sentries urging us to get to class. “How did you think of that?”
A better question would be: what exactly are they doing here?

This story has thus far done a much better job than its predecessor of following a more or less linear narrative that makes sense most of the time. However, in this instance we've just been dumped into a completely random location with zero explanation as to why they came here or what they hope to achieve. I'm assuming it has something to do with one of their new contracts, but a quick refresher on the specifics would be helpful here.

>Robronco sentries
this has Mlpol meme written all over it
Calling it now: Mcguffin.exe is in some way relate to DJ's prescient awareness of BJ's exploits

This isn't the first Fallout Equestria story that tried to depict being assigned a job as a bad thing.

Do the authors have a problem with the concept of Cutie Marks?

Cheerilee wasn't made a teacher at birth or assigned a teaching career. Her talent with kids made her decide to be a teacher.

>>376265
Having read this slop before, i can definitively answer this with 'no'.
Something (and somepony) else DO track her through it, but it's beyond the retardation event horizon, so i'll let Glim suffer finding the specifics in that hellhole.
Not sure i can read this shit while sober, and drunken relation of contents would be retarded.
>>376286
>Do the authors have a problem with the concept of Cutie Marks?
generally yes

>>376265
RobCo from Fallout and the author's choice to rename it to Robronco predates Denver Broncosposting by many years, maybe even a decade.

Is it a spoiler for this story to tell you something retarded already revealed in Fallout Equestria, when this story is written expecting you to have already read all of Fallout Equestria and regularly references things you'd only know if you've already finished it?
Spoiler warning: extreme radioactive levels of retardation, or to put it another way, brony writing

DJ PON3 aka Homage uses a pre-war magic surveillance network that can see anything. Nopony gave a fuck about the ethical questions involved in its creation or maintenance before or during or after the war. Homage doesn't need Eyebots/Spritebots to see for her. She doesn't need hacked PipBucks or pre-war computers with their own surveillance networks to see for her. She can just see anything she wants because magic. Why doesn't she exploit the fuck out of this to coordinate military operations and tell mercenary teams exactly where they can find poners who need saving and the best loot? Because plot. Kkat wants things to happen exactly as they happened in his favourite video game, so they do, even though the contrived excuse for why they are the way they are should change what they are and how they are used.

Tenpony Tower was constructed specifically for this all-seeing eye and yet its true purpose somehow eludes the current rulers of the tower and all the rich morons in the tower who produce nothing necessary for survival and yet somehow subsist off providing the illusion of class and luxury (like "fancy food in small portions" and spa services) for Wastelanders so absurdly eager to purchase this they'll risk getting raped and murdered horribly and eaten and mutilated and pissed on and turned into Raider Art scavenging the nearby enemy-infested ruins of 200 year old cities for perfectly preserved canned spam and donate this food so it can be served in restaurants. In small portions, of course, because kkat is a child who relied on television to understand the world before consoomerist gayming replaced his tv, and the tv said rich people only eat oddly small meals.

The tower is a meritocracy that puts the word of its citizens and the needs of its citizens above those of outsiders, as imagined by a libtard midwit subconsciously buttmad that it's not a liberal democracy like all "Good(TM)" characters exclusively want in his cartoonishly simplistic intellectually stunted world. That murderous Griffon with a nonsensical fetish for contract rules as written/interpreted/whatever the author decides in the moment? Wants a liberal democracy just as much as everyone else not designated Evil(TM). No attempt is made to understand why anyone would want the tower to be this way, the DJ gets to insult the place and its poners to her heart's content and nothing is done to humanize (ponify? whatever) the authority figures because they aren't liberal midwits.

The retarded liberal midwit author knew people hated the illogical "Rich Tenpenny Tower in Fallout 3 that provides nothing of value to anyone yet is nonsensically full of rich racist cunts who hate le poor outsider have-nots" and the "Magic omniscient DJ whose obsession with you is never explained" but he didn't understand why(even though people dumb enough to have played Fallout 3 and smart enough to have hated it aren't shy about why it fails as a Fallout sequel and as writing in general), so he provided his own retarded explanations for how they work the exact same retarded way or "better" in his story. Kkat even copied over the stupid "Let Ghoul squatters in to slaughter everyone in the tower, kill the Ghouls when the rich tell you to, or never accept/complete this quest" quest and tried to fix it by making a made-up "evil" Security guy slaughter the Ghoul squatters beforehand, and then after the radio DJ calls that guy a cunt, Steelhooves makes sure to get him killed by feral Ghouls at the earliest contrived convenience because racial loyalty. Even though being a Ghoul is an affliction, not a race, and Applejack's 260 year old boyfriend Steelhooves shouldn't give this much of a shit about other Ghouls when he doesn't give as much of a shit about things he should shit harder about. Then again who knows where his heart shits considering his Memory Orb wasn't used to store his first memory of meeting or fucking or dating Applejack but of some fucking power armour lore the author wanted Littleshit to know. Fucking Christ. The bronies called this good writing. The bronies wanted to write crap just like this. Bronies would take being called the next kkat or chatoyance as a fucking compliment. Trees were chopped down for printing this fucking thing. And at the climax of a "story" that could have been 20% the length or less if LP was only going to glitch past a bugged impossible barrier anyway, kkat's feminized self-insert rants that the ending of the story he wrote makes no sense and thinking about it hurts his head. Why does torrenting take so fucking long?

>>376375
Nihilistic liberal midwits seem to have a problem with the concept of living with a fulfilling purpose that honours your talents and interests and benefits your people, even if they can't pinpoint why it enrages them so.

>>376380
>DJ
Wow, thats even more retarded than the lazy-writing mcguffin prediction I made.
Regardless, the DJ is basically a method of allowing the author to glaze about their OC demands some degree of prescience, surveillance, etc., so a corrupted/backdoor file access seemed a simple enough explanation. Thanks friendo

>predates broncoposting
Obviously, it wasn't an Mlpol reference. But that doesnt mean it couldnt be appropriated

>>376382
>But that doesnt mean it couldnt be appropriated
Appropriating anything from this awful piece of writing only diminishes whatever it's appropriated for, unless you go through the effort of basically rewriting it from scratch yourself.
Do yourself a favor and don't.

>>376384
Would you be offended if notified that your reception to the idea tracks as incentive?

>>376381
Yeah, GTA had a radio and people loved that so Fallout 3 has a radio on your arm mounted retarded computer because BugthEAsderp wishes Fallout was Borderlands because Borderlands the gay californized Max Max ripoff made a Bordillion dollars once upon a time.
Thank Christ the PipBoy isn't also a radio in Fallout 3 or you'd get retarded Rick and Morty characters yapping in your ear the whole time like in Borderlands. More like Birchlands.
Go explore the Wasteland in Fallout 1 or 2, hear the spooky wind noises, think before moving and shooting, knowing that with every item consumed and every cap spent on supplies and every day spent on travel you are closer to failing your mission, it has a certain atmosphere.
Aimlessly murderhoboing around the neon green concrete clusterfuck of Fallout 3 firing forks from your Rock-It Launcher and Nukes from your Fat Man(TM) Nuclear Slingshot at bullet sponges while BONGO BONGO BONGO I DON'T WANNA LEAVE THE CONGO plays has a different atmosphere. When not playing music the radio has an omniscient DJ obsessed with sucking your cock and calling you a hero or cunt over the airwaves whether you choose the Good Karma Option for no reason or Bad Karma Option for no reason.
Fallout New Vegas used this retarded idea correctly. Mr New Vegas is an AI under Mr House's control telling the wastes exactly what he wants them to know. It's not some random NPC glazing you. It's a radio voice telling you the consequences of your action.
>Caesar's Legion are bad dudes, Legate Lanius took an underperforming group and killed a tenth of them.
>NCR's railway would be a nightmare to fix if someone blew it up PLEASE DESTROY IT.
>Go to the Silver Rush, they sell guns.
>Some Courier got shot in the head in Goodsprings and made a full recovery. Now that's a delivery service you can rely on!
>Trade along the I-15 is better now that someone killed the fire breathing mutant giant ants the NCR couldn't handle without external help.
>General Hanlon just took Hanlon's Razor to his own throat, and Rangers are being taken from the front lines to better defend NCR territory.
>Primm and Novac and Freeside had their problems solved. Nice.

Fundamentally hearing someone mention your good deeds after a bounty hunting mission in an informative concise way for the benefit of people in the world...
>According to a new report, violent crime is on a sharp decline in New Vegas. The report credits the decline of the population of Fiends in the area.
Has a different vibe compared to wannabe Borderlands dialogue sucking your cock for playing the video game.
>Let's give it up for THE VAULT DWELLER, THAT GLORIOUS SAINT FROM VAULT 101, who killed The Fiends! Keep fighting the good fight, my friend! I'd help, but I'd rather be here running the radio behind bulletproof glass in my pre war bunker hahaha lol I'm so funny! Awoo, I'm 3-Dawg and this next song goes out to The Vault Dweller, lightbringer and wasteland saviour and father of my wife's children!

Kkat saw the memes about 3Dog being gay for the protagonist and took them literally and tried to play it seriously in his porn-burnout coombrain Lesbian Blood and Death Fetish Magical Realm(tm), even though their attraction is as shallow and devoid of substance as the rest of the story. We're expected to feel emotions when the DJ calls Littlepoop a faggot for slaughtering cannibals because genocide is mean or whatever. Kkat thinks he wrote a smarter version of Fallout 3 that cleverly incorporates Fallout 1 and 2 and New Vegas elements into his story which therefore makes it a Fallout game. This is obviously retarded.

>>376382
If you want to be the funniest man who ever lived say Denver Broncos over and over. Call them amazing in a comedically inappropriate setting llike during a thread about something else entirely. The juxtaposition will make people laugh so hard they throw up.

>>376397
It's not at all like Borderlands. The radio in Fallout 3 reacts to the player action, delivers quest prompts, and the whole signal strength system opens up other gameplay elements. Radio in Borderlands was gay because Borderlands is gay.
>Thank Christ the PipBoy isn't also a radio in Fallout 3
You made a mistake in the number you typed. This results in everything typed after being disregarded.

Take your butthurt to the streets of London where it is needed.

>>376397
>that first part
I no understandey
>that secomd
You seemed adroit in your previous posts/ideas, but you lost me there.
Understand, you're conflating John Elway with the Denver Broncos.
I'm kidding, you should absolutely conflate John Elway with the Denver Broncos for they're two of the triparate manifestation, the third of which being Football. This is what was written into the stones of Gobekli Tepe:
-All that is manifest is a conglomeration of many Footballs (scientists insist theyre atoms or molecules, but they also insist the earth is round lol)
All is piles of infinite Footballs
-John Elway is Football
-The Denver Broncos are also Football
We can decode these phrases to mean that John Elway IS the infinite mass of Football and footballs, through time immemorial including multiverses (which not even Marvel figured out by now)

We can also decode that when observed in a limited spectrum but not a specific one, any number of them can be said to be Denver Broncos, but NOT John Elway (cuz the former - while being Football - isn't 100% Football, because then they would evolve like a Pokemon from a Denver Bronco into a Denver RoBronco(oh yeah) and THEN and ONLY with God, Anime, and Dan Reeves might you evolve INTO John Elway.
Having said, John Elway was born of Rainbow Dash so only then can you be John Elway. Checkmate atheists.

The whole of reality is John Elway/Football existing on several levels. John Elway is the singularity, opposed by Football which is the shape/nature of all expressions of life, and dually anti-polar in between the macroscope and the microscope is the Denver Broncos; plenty enough to be Football, but specific enough to be John Elway.

Apologies for not finishing.
In that John Elway is the perfect expression of all of manifest existence given singular human form, of COURSE he is the funniest person writ large, and emulation of him might get a person on the fast-track to going viral

>>376409
Yes, the PipBoy in Fallout 3 is a Radio in the sense that it can listen to egomaniacs and old people music. But it isn't the one-way phone kind of Radio, like in Borderlands.
You don't get one-sided conversations from Borderlands characters like in Borderlands (I was talking about Borderlands). Could you fucking imagine how much more obnoxious those one note characters would be if they were constantly in your earpiece? Imagine Grandma Sparkle calling you to remind you to bring her a violin. Which you can also give to some other guy for no reason if you feel like being evil. Christ, Fallout 3 is such a black hole of cancerous stupidity I can feel it sucking my brain cells away. There are "humans" on this rock who defended it and the company responsible. If democracy worked and the people could be trusted with freedom, every dogshit game in the world would get Dustborn/Concord numbers.
Fallout New Vegas Dead Money gets a pass for having Elijah in your ear because it's written well. Butterfly Boy does not.
Are you really going to talk to me about taking your anger to the streets, Canadian? Remind me how many communists that "Freedom Convoy" killed in Hinpoostan 2: Shit-Scented Pooinloo. There is no amount of peaceful resistance that will purge the country of its problems or "wake up the woke". They all secretly know what they're doing and enjoy it. It's why they smirk so much when you beat them in arguments. They find it funny that you know what they are and aren't doing anything to stop them. Personally shaming individuals for not going Rambo on the rape apes is a jewish demoralization tactic. Purging a country isn't a one man job. I've got what I need to defend my loved ones in case of an emergency. If I get locked up I can't do that.

>>376421
Go kill yourself, you inbred furfag sonichu britcuck.

>>376463
Is that loli-obsessed cringetard you're badly impersonating actually still alive? I'd check if he is by checking if he's shilled for his loli asset flip consoomer kusoge on reddit recently but I can't be arsed. It'd make you feel weird if he moved on to a happier more fulfilling life that doesn't involve you, right? Honestly it would be pretty funny if he turned his life around and made meaningful friendships outside. Heartwarming too.

Man, isn't it gay that the author of this gay fic hates the Enclave?

The Enclave is America as seen by liberals who thought the jewish anriwhite (but I repeat myself) Starship Troopers film is an accurate and hilarious mockery of american white conservative "fascists" and "their" neocon fascist military and "their" deep state. They get out their flamethrowers and miniguns and violently slaughter anyone who is not like them because hurr durr, fascists hate everyone who is not like them. They even have Frank Horrigan, a Super Mutant in power armour, because of course they do, of course these fascist humanists with strong opinions about mutants and poor people and tribals not being human would do the hypocrite transhumanist bit. You can't talk him into fucking off or killing himself but you can hack turrets to get help killing him and talk guys into helping you kill him. Weird, huh? People praised how you can talk The Master to death in Fallout 1 and end his dream of forced globalism and the new master race of mutant slaves unified under mandatory assimilation by telling him his master race is sterile and showing proof.

To a liberal, fascism is a vague idea. Unity, force, assimilation, control, order, the man, loss of individuality, self improvement, having standards, wanting living space, opposing authority, being authority, this is all fascist. Britain is fascist because it wasn't eager enough to start killing Germans sooner. America is fascist because sometimes it acts against communist regimes instead of for them. The Enclave is fascist because they wear power armour and go mwahaha and slaughter the innocent and helpless for no real reason. It doesn't matter if the fascists are objectively right to be "racist" against Ghouls and Super Mutants. It doesn't matter if democracy is such a shitshow in Star Wars everyone wants to go back to the Galactic Empire and reform it by any means necessary. Truth doesn't matter, only ideals, but the only ideals that matter is the herd, and the herd hates fascism because the herdmaster says fascism is collectivism but bad and also individualism but bad.

Even though in the Fallout Equestria setting they are just Pegasi who got sick of the surface world and its wars, they are shoehorned into the role of the Deep State Bad Military Men Serving Fake Presidents On Oil Rigs. Blackjack irrationally hates them because the author irrationally hates them. How dare those Pegasi not die to the last man fighting for a liberal shithole Equestria full of satanic zebra nuclear suicide bombers. How dare they suck at protecting charity workers. You know, as if they were obligated to try harder to feed and clothe and civilize the violent wasteland. But not with too much force of course, that would be fascist. No, you have to do it with extreme violence while saying it's for liberal democracy, that makes it okay. That makes everything okay.

More like ogay. God I'm hilarious.

>>376485
Anon, you seem to be doing better for yourself and I'm happy for you, just wanted to say

>>376485
Hi, I haven't talked to you since, but just wanted to say, welcome back, friend.

Kkat is fucking deranged.

He might not realize it, it might not motivate him to hurt others in real life through any method except voting for evil, but Kkat's story is one where a narcissistic murderhobo kills and robs and kills again until all the "inherently bad" are dead and all the "inherently good" get to enforce a liberal democracy where the grass is edible again and scarcity is gone. Ponies stop shitting in their beds and making guro art on walls for fun because they can eat grass again. Littlepip's plan for defeating the "fascists" was to take from them their superior capacity to feed themselves and others in the hopes that it forces them to rely on the surface world scavenging 200 year old ruins for food and they never resent the surface world for this... and nobody ever questions her assumed moral right to do this but her plan ends up being irrelevant when the author lets her noclip into the dev area and undo the apocalypse at will.

What libtardism does to a mf.

There's a masterpiece of a game that says it's morally wrong to try to read into an artist through what they create. Making dark violent art isn't necessarily a sign that you're mentally in a dark violent place, maybe you just want to make something dark and violent for fun or think it will sell well. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes it's not that deep. Maybe that chick made that shooter game full of advertisements of hot babes because she's saying something profound about advertising and art and maybe it's there because she's a victim of a body image disorder that causes her to resent hot babes in ads. Maybe that guy who made beautiful robot chicks die horribly in a shooter full of guro shit actually likes guro shit and maybe he's intentionally trying to make people uncomfortable by contrasting the beautiful with the grotesque, but either way that doesn't make his game any less of a coomer game than the shooter one where you're a hot buff demon chick.

And then there's chatoyance, a smug spoiled brat of a liberal boomer who, despite supposedly being in a loving relationship with two men, only bitched at me about how much he secretly resented them for feeling like their adopted parent when we talked about them, and every day he goes to his hugbox on fimfic to rant about hating Trump, wanting whites to be genocided, claiming antifa doesn't exist and did nothing wrong, loving the feeling of being lonely in No Man's Sky, ranting about hating humanity, crying about not being in Star Trek or the Friendship Is Optimal setting where humanity was so pathetically obsessed with escapism, an AI was able to talk most of humanity into killing themselves while uploading bad copies of themselves to Pornhub's VR Chat server's Equestria section. Or the Conversion Bureau setting where Equestria warps into Earth and forces humanity to choose death as soulless meat automatons or assimilation into ponyland while abandoning everything the author sees as toxically masculine about whites and humanity as a whole. You don't get to marry Twilight Sparkle, unless you're someone very lucky you become one of countless nameless faceless nobodies sent miles away from the ponies to figure Equestrian culture out from fucking books with no real pony friends because the author has terminal Scifi Brainrot and one of the earliest symptoms is Accute Dyscalculal Scaleosis, the inability to understand numbers when it comes to any sense of scale. He didn't grow up surrounded by crackhead wiggers in a slum in the ass end of nowhere, he had it too good and always felt he deserved better and humanity failed him for not giving him better. Every time his father forced him to move around the country that was a fresh chance to start over and make new friends but he chose to see evil in masculinity and white normalcy and this alienated him from most people and drove him into the manipulative arms of libtardism. He poisoned his loved ones with the killshot, the clot shot, the vax, call it what you want. And he's so fucking angry over the failures of his ideology. He wrote liberal propaganda taken to such an extreme it alienated other liberals and caused them to hate him for being different because that is liberalism's true face even when you're not a threat to its power, even when you only accidentally did a heresy against the liberal idea that liberals in power with sufficient power and technology can cure anything ever without needing any help from non-liberal ideologies or non-liberal alien friends or non-liberal gods. He has it so good he can go anywhere and do anything and he still rants in his hugbox about wanting whites genocided while he could be spending his final years offline surrounded by loved ones. Why love when you can hate? What libtardism does to a mf.

Fallout Equestria Project Horizons is so inconsistent in quality and full of holes because it's trying to fix Fallout Equestria by treating the symptoms (nonsense worldbuilding, bad main plot, invincible narcissist protagonist with uninteresting one-note gun drones for NPC allies) and ignoring the disease of liberalism. And being a manchild who doesn't get economies or people or storytelling but I repeat myself. And the fundamental incompatibility of ponies and Bethesda's Fallout. Ponies in Dark Setting works when you look at Dark Souls and admire the way goodness and kindness shines brighter in hell and struggling to hold on to what matters and do what's right has value. Bethesda's Fallout is a shooting gallery for children who wish they were playing Borderlands 2 right now.

>>376610
Literally the last two posts were praising your restraint and development, and then

>>376613
They were glad I was back and doing better than ever. If I was still a kid I'd rant about how great things are for me right now thanks to my own hard work but that was always a stupid thing for me to do.

Libtardism is the mind virus responsible for the fic sucking gay asshole. If I can't say that here because "post too long, how dare you not restrain yourself for me" where can I say it? Project Horizons exists because the author wanted to fix what personally frustrated him about this mediocre overhyped shitfic and prove to the fandom he can do better, yet his libtardism stops him from recognizing the Enclave in Fallout is objectively right, and his stated admiration of kkat (and desire not to alienate his fanbase by rewriting the dumbest parts of kkat's canon, making the fic niche within a niche within a niche) keeps him from rewriting shit.

Pegasi shouldn't be conscripted by an incompetent government directed by six young adults, one incompetent ruler who's been on the moon for a thousand years, and one mindbroken ruler, and sent to die killing a force your own country is importing and desperately trying and failing to civilize and integrate. Not one pony should have to fear a Zebra caravan full of rapefugees using military-grade chemical weapons against their foals or anyone else's foals just because the automated turrets activated when the hungry ziggers broke in to rob a school in the middle of fucking nowhere. pony columbnine/eleven's consequence: Mindbroken Celestia, Luna in power, Zigs malding harder.

>"bUt OnLy A fAsCiSt WoUlD oPpOsE wAr!"

The Enclave is painted as "evil and fascist and jingoistic and ruled by a transhumanist cultist madman who wants to become God" because this is what Evil looks like to the pozzed western mind. You don't draw devil horns on someone to show he's evil, you draw a SS uniform and a hitler moustache on him like the "Fascist Authority" in Rage. Making him a fat ugly diseased Trump "parody" like in Rage 2 is an option, but he wasn't relevant when FOE was written and Hitler will continue to be the enduring satanic Archetype of the new world order's satanism until they are destroyed.

I didn't feel like saying this until now but if Princess Luna walked into Zebrica and offered up her head, the Ziggers convinced "Nightmare Moon is Luna and the stars are eldritch abominations out to get us" might have stopped being pure evil in the name of respecting their own objectively evil morally and scientifically inferior backwards religion's beliefs. Or maybe not, who knows?

Just imagine a Fallout Equestria fanfiction where a Mare at an Enclave rally cheers, begs for them to bring her boys home before this war kills them, and then the jackbooted government thugs of Pinkie Pie's secret police show up to put everyone in re-education camps.

>"the jackbooted government thugs of Pinkie Pie's secret police"...

This is too divorced from reality for anything serious to be taken seriously. FOE fans would get mad because "How dare you humanize the Enclave" and "The Enclave didn't exist at that point in canon, they weren't a political movement, they were le ebil secret fascist sympathizers in teh govt".

Fanfictions have to take the "Yes, and" approach to writing if they don't want to alienate viewers by saying "No, actually" instead. It comes with the territory. If you say "No, that's fucking retarded" and substitute your own headcanons for "real" canon you alienate fans of that shit canon even if your own story ends up better for it. There is no salvaging this shit, it's just too fucking retarded.

Twilight suddenly has a brother and he's married to a third alicorn with a whole kingdom, Discord is friends with Fluttershy, Twilight runs a retarded school to teach foreigners ethics yet sucks and requires these kids to figure it out for themselves through trial and error, and Pinkie Pie is married to Weird Al's self-insert? Yes, and... Any story just has to deal with that, ignore it, or provide an excuse for why certain show elements don't show up when they should, or alienate fans of this nonsense by rejecting it entirely and saying no, there are two Alicorns, Twilight doesn't have a brother, and nothing after season one is canon.

Fallout's world went to war with itself and nuked itself because "We started running out of resources, especially oil, let's invade Canada for fucking OIL" even though nuclear power can produce more than enough energy for everyone's energy needs, and Fallout cars have their own nuclear reactor engines that go boom when shot enough.

It's been 200 years and that bitch running a trading post out of a pre-war diner can't be arsed to clean the Environmental Storytelling Skeletons from her living space. The new Fallout TV show came out and said it's Canon(tm) that Vault-Tec nuked the world to create instant demand for nuclear shelters instead of being paid to make more and also so they can have all the money ever, and Shady Sands was nuked so the show can contain nostalgiabait memberberries without the NCR getting in the way of being bootleg Borderlands but gayer.

Fallout Equestria let the ziggers in, they attacked because "the night is evil", they were given Healing ICBMs because Fluttershy thought if nobody could be hurt nobody would be evil, the ziggers detonated hellfire megaspells in Equestria because "I'm not letting Nightmare Moon win". Fluttershy's "kindness" led to the downfall of Equestria but she gets to survive this shit and live happily ever while her friends get horribly killed and Celestia gets trapped in a fucking machine to powerlessly watch this meat grinder of a world keep churning..Luna's skull was worn by a red and black Alicorn OC and bronies call this shit "peak".

To make a good coherent story you have to let go of the past and learn from its mistakes.

Can't keep coming back to these died-up old wells. There are older stories, ancient stories, with better lessons to teach.

"Let go, and begin again" was what FNV wanted to teach.

>>376616
If you weren't a self-absorbed twat you would realize (it's obvious, look at the poster ID) that I was one of the people trying to give credit for ny dong what you are now doing in spades
>To make a good coherent story you have to
When have you ever made a good coherent story?

>>376616
>If I was still a kid I'd rant
>proceeds to rant
Congrats on growing up my dude

>>376263

Anyway, the party is in some old high school for some reason or other; I think they're here to search for old computer parts or something. They head to the Library and poke around a little.

>he looked down at a textbook showing two red-striped zebras. I thought they looked a bit like hooved candy canes myself. I looked at the caption beneath. ‘The Proditor, or ‘traitors’ in the zebra tongue, were those few zebras willing and allowed to fight for Equestria against their own kind. Using talismans to permanently alter their stripe color, they fought with distinction until being phased out due to security concerns after the Battle of Shattered Hoof Ridge.’
Always kill a traitor before an enemy, Jim Jam.

>I noticed the Crusaders were looking a bit nervous. “What’s up?” I asked them. “First day of school jitters?”
Wait, the Crusaders? Why are they here? Have they been here the whole time?

I went back to the beginning of the chapter and found this:
>The seven of us had stumbled onto the grounds and been ordered to report to the office or face immediate vaporization.
This is literally the only indication we are given that the party is larger than its usual three members.

This is why setting the scene is important. This is also why it's important to make sure all characters are active in any scene they appear in. If you can't handle this, or you've got too many characters in a scene to keep track of, then you need to tailor your scenes so that only the essential characters are included. The reader can't see what's in your head, so you have to paint as complete an image for them as possible.

I re-read the beginning portion of this chapter, as well as the end of the previous chapter, and here is what I think is going on:

The four Crusaders, whose names are Adagio, Medley, Sonata and Allegro, are apparently tagging along with the party for some yet-unexplained reason. They are a hold-over from the previous episode: the ranchers had accused them of being cattle-rustlers, but it turned out that the dragons were the real culprits. After the dragons were dealt with, the party left the ranchers' land, and the Crusaders went with them.

To the author's credit, on closer inspection I see that he does explicitly note the presence of the additional party members. In the culvert scene that ends Chapter 8, he briefly describes their sleeping arrangement and notes that there are seven ponies in their group.

However, this is not enough to reinforce the presence of the new characters. For most of the adventure so far, the party has either consisted of Blackjack, Morning Glory and P-21, or just Blackjack and P-21 traveling as a duo. The four foals are a new addition, and they haven't really done all that much to distinguish themselves. What's more, the closing scene of the previous chapter didn't focus on them at all; they were apparently sleeping in the culvert while the fight was going on.

It was also not made explicitly clear at the end of the chapter that the seven of them would continue to travel together. There's no obvious reason why they should, and there's been little mention of them. I had assumed the party and the Crusaders would have parted ways by now, so I haven't been imagining them as part of the scene.

Again: this is why it's important to properly set a scene. The last two sections of Chapter 8 were mostly focused on conversation, with very little attention paid to the party's surroundings. The second to last scene, where they are all listening to the radio, I had envisioned taking place back at the bunker where the party first encountered the Crusaders, but upon closer inspection it seems like they were all on the road together. The opening scene of this chapter just dumps us unceremoniously into this school, with absolutely no explanation given as to what even the three main party members would be doing there, let alone four ancillary characters who have no obvious reason to be tagging along.

Things like this shouldn't be ambiguous. If the dialogue in a given scene is more important than the action then by all means focus on dialogue, but at the same time it should be clear to the reader where the characters are and what they are doing. Moreover, if you're going to have seven characters in a scene, then all seven of them need to be actively involved in whatever is going on. Characters who stand in the background and don't speak are quickly forgotten. Even if the main focus is on P-21, BJ and MG, the four crusaders should either be interjecting lines into the conversation periodically, or doing stuff in the background that reinforces their presence. Remember: the reader can't see what's in your head; they need to be told what's going on.

Anyway, the party is in the Library of this old high school for some reason or another. The author has at least established that much. It seems that the Crusaders at least have some general knowledge of this place, so maybe the idea is that they're acting as guides or something.

>“It’s just…” Adagio muttered, “…there’s supposed to be ghosts here.”
>I would have laughed, but then again I laughed when Scoodle had seemed afraid in the boneyard. Not again. Besides, with the Wasteland, who knew what you might run into? “Well. If there are, they’ll have to get through me first!” I replied
Ghosts are by definition incorporeal, so getting through her shouldn't be all that hard. Just sayin.

>Using their hall passes, P-21, Glory, and the Crusaders dispersed from the classroom and set about looting anything edible, drinkable, or medical they could get their hooves on.
>This left me alone in the second floor of the library and looking out at Brimstone's Fall.
Yet again, we see the after-effects of poor scene-setting cascading downward and causing ripple-effects that ruin enjoyment of the story. Are they in the library or a classroom? Or is the entire building a library? If so, then does that mean it's not a school? Things like this shouldn't be ambiguous.

>>376645

>And we were doomed because I was going to have to come up with a plan. Me. The not a smart pony.
First of all, this sentence:
>The not a smart pony.
is bad and you should feel bad. In fiction it's permissible to play fast and loose with grammar for effect, but your prose needs to at least be readable. Simply adding a few hyphens would make all the difference:
>The not-a-smart-pony.

Second, it's not clear why the task of coming up with a plan should automatically fall on Blackjack's shoulders. Actually, third, it's not even clear why anyone needs to come up with a plan, since it's never even been established what the fuck they are doing here in the first place.

>Brimstone's Fall wasn’t much to look at, really; just a round, jagged hole punched in the badlands’ surface. It had been a gemstone mine. Then, during the height of the war, a dragon had fallen right on top of the mine workings. The ‘Shadowbolts’ pegasus strike force, along with heavy ground support, slew a powerful dragon allied with the zebras, but hundreds of soldiers had died before the dragon perished. I knew all of this because there was a framed news article hanging next to the window.
>In two hundred years it hadn’t changed much. It lay right beside rail lines stretching to the southwest, towards Fillydelphia. On the surface were a large administration building and two long barracks-style houses. Since I didn’t see any slaves, I assumed that they had to be quartered underground. Two nested chain link fences topped by razor wire surrounded the hole and the three buildings, with a guarded hoof bridge built over the rail spurs where they passed through the fences. A chain link gate blocked the space under the bridge. Maybe we could find--
Fascinating, but my original question still stands: why the fuck did you come here and what the fuck are you trying to achieve?

If I remember correctly, back at the Wal-Mart BJ mentioned something about going to Paradise or Belcher's Grove or wherever Bottlecap's sister is supposed to be running her slave operation, to try and put a dent in the slave trade because slavery is icky. Maybe that's why they came here? The above paragraph mentions slaves, so for the sake of my own sanity I'm just going to proceed on this assumption.

Anyway, while she's staring out the window, she gets a weird feeling and spins around, but sees nothing. Her PipBuck also doesn't show any enemies. However, she keeps seeing mysterious movements out of the corner of her eye, and the Crusaders mentioned ghosts earlier. Presumably, this is meant to foreshadow whatever monster-of-the-week is going to appear in this episode.

P-21 returns to whatever room BJ is in, apparently finished with whatever area he was exploring of whatever building they are in. He tosses her a Sparkle-Cola.

>I caught it with my magic and deftly popped the top. It was warm, but it was Sparkle-Cola.
As an aside, is there any logical way she would even know what Sparkle-Cola tastes like cold? Seems to me refrigeration would be a lost science by now. From what I understand, they've mostly been getting their soda from old vending machines, but I would assume that the only way to do this would be to break into them. Unless they're powered by some kind of self-sustaining magic, the machines themselves logically ought to have stopped working by now. Details like this aren't going to make or break a story, but putting thought into them will go a long way towards making your setting believable.

>“Yeah. Just trying to figure out how to get in there,” I said as I scanned the mine once again for some chink in their defenses. The guards moved in threes and fours. There wasn’t the slightest bit of cover to use to approach from the ground. And then there were the neighbors. Along the highway between the mine and the road was a strip mall. Most of the shops seemed more or less intact and there was a large gathering of ponies there. At least twenty or so. “Allegro? Who’re they?”
>He trotted to the window and I held the binoculars for him. “Oh, them. Pecos. They’re just a gang outta Flank. Not as crazy as raiders. They usually work protection for the slavers.”
>Great. Between the Pecos and the slavers I was looking at forty or fifty enemies. “They’re not slavers?”
Seriously, wtf are you guys even trying to accomplish here? From context, we can more or less piece together that this location is some kind of slavers' compound, and our little group of three seven friends is trying to infiltrate it because reasons. However, I must once again protest that no actual goal has yet been established. We can see what these characters are doing, but can only guess as to why they are doing it. This was one of the most pervasive problems in the first story.

>>376646

Thanks to my old friend Ctrl-F, I was able to find this in Chapter 7:

>“Are you able to?” Bottlecap stood and walked to me with a probing expression. “Because if you want to do something in the Wasteland, somepony is going to get hurt. Maybe you. Maybe your friends. Maybe somepony who deserves to hurt. Maybe somepony who doesn’t. Can you handle it?”

>Then I realized what she was asking me. Could I hurt? Could I kill? Could I handle paying the price for being a killer, or would I keep breaking over and over again till there was nothing left? “I don’t know,” I replied. “I thought I was. Now I don’t know what to think.”

>“Guess we’ll find out,” Bottlecap said softly. “You already struck a blow against her, thanks to DJ Pon3. I’ll never know how he got that recording, but I’m sure every slaving band is wondering just how much of a threat you really are. The more you disrupt supply, the better. But, eventually, you’ll have to tackle the demand. Some, like Red Eye in Fillydelphia, probably wouldn’t stop unless he died. But there are others, like Brimstone's Fall, where the slave operations are smaller and more manageable.”

>I glanced at my PipBuck and noticed that it had added a square far to the south and west of Megamart. How did it do that? Bottlecap noticed my look and smiled. “I can’t, of course, offer you a contract for this. If my sisters thought I was deliberately undermining them, it would be all-out war within the Finders.”

>I looked back at her. Do better. Could I? I had to. Otherwise I’d be nothing more than a killer. “Know of any contract work in the area?” I offered a tense smile. “After all, trouble seems to find me easily enough. When it does, who can say what’ll happen?”

The idea here seems to be that Bottlecap is asking Blackjack if she would be willing to take down her sister's slaving operation. She can't outright hire BJ to do this, since she can't be seen publicly moving against her sister, but she is clearly suggesting it. What's more, BJ seems to be willing to take the assignment, more for moral reasons than practical ones. This is the first time Brimstone's Fall is mentioned in the text, so presumably this is the answer to the question of why they would come here.

This at least provides BJ with a clear goal, and the dialogue does a reasonably good job clarifying her reasons for undertaking it. Everything would be fine and dandy, except in the very next scene we have this:

>The jobs were simple and legitimate. Patrol the Sunset Highway between Megamart and Flank, poke through the Miramare Air Station for some electronic parts, and deliver some mail to Flank’s residents. The route would also take me within spitting distance of Brimstone's Fall. If something should happen that put a dent in the demand side of the slave trade, then it’d not only help the people of the Wasteland but Bottlecap as well.
The implication here is that BJ & Co. are taking on three new contracts to replace the previous three which they completed. While the near-term goal is still to get to Brimstone's Fall, we should expect that these three tasks will need to be taken care of beforehand.

Generally, the best way to tell a large and complicated story is to break it into small episodes. There is a grand adventure that serves as the main plot of the story, but the journey is long, and will consist of many smaller quests that take place along the way.

Consider Fellowship of the Ring. Gandalf tells Frodo the legend and origins of the Ring, then instructs him to take it to Rivendell. However, first they are going to have to make it to the nearby village of Bree and meet up with Strider. This is Tolkien laying out the story and telling the reader what to expect: the main plot of the novel is going to focus on the journey to Rivendell, but the first episode is going to focus on the journey to Bree. The Rivendell trip itself is implied to be only a single episode in an even larger journey that is hinted at but not yet fully fleshed out.

The idea is to break the main story into episodic microstories so the reader isn't overwhelmed. This is especially important in large, complicated stories that involve a lot of locations, events and characters. Each episode should have its own clear beginning, middle and end, with each episode itself serving as a waypoint in the larger story. You should not begin a new episode until the previous one has concluded.

However, Somber has given us a bit of a rug-pull. He's already set up a couple of long-term goals for his character: defeat the wankers who invaded her Stable, and get macguffin.mp3 decoded. He then adds a medium-term goal to the mix: take down the slaving operation run by Bottlecap's sister, because morals or whatever. To accomplish this, he assigns BJ three short-term goals, which are basically just one-off quests that serve the dual purpose of earning the group some money (essential to the long-term goal) and bringing them closer to the slaver group (essential to the mid-term goal).

One would thus expect that the next item on BJ's agenda would involve one of these three short-term goals; however, they were sidetracked by the episode with the dragons, due to an unexpected encounter. That's fine, but now that this side-quest is complete, we should expect the party to return to its original goals.

Patrolling the highway is kind of an open-ended quest that could be done concurrently with the others, so logically, in the next major episode, BJ should either:
>poke through the Miramare Air Station for some electronic parts
or
>deliver some mail to Flank’s residents

However, instead of doing either of these things, they are suddenly in Brimstone Falls, exploring some previously-unmentioned school for some yet-unexplained reason. The effect is jarring; it's like Gandalf telling Frodo that he needs to go to Rivendell, but then in the next chapter they're suddenly in the Misty Mountains.

>>376647

Anywho, BJ stands at the window watching the slavers and plotting her next move. It's a pretty standard FoE setup: the slavers operate in some kind of underground tunnel network called the Mines, and use trains to move their cargo. They have a semi-organized bandit gang called the Pecos working security for them. Lots of guards, probably monsters and whatever too, going down there would be certain death, yada yada yada she's going to go down there anyway, because reasons.

She decides that the best way to infiltrate the compound is to disguise herself as one of the Pecos and sneak in. This seems like kind of a dumb idea, since she is now one of the most recognizable figures in the entire Wasteland, and on top of that she has a huge bounty on her head. I think she's well past the point where taking off her stable barding and putting on a hat is a sufficient enough effort to disguise herself. However, I will once again give Somber a few points for improving on kkat's formula here: this plan is slightly less ridiculous than Littlepip's Rambo-style one-mare-army infiltration of the slaver compound, and considerably less ridiculous than that trick she used where she made herself suddenly invisible by hiding behind a bedsheet.

>The sun was just starting to set when the train returned. Lots of empty boxes and crates; apparently the trade was all one way. Did the gems go back to Paradise, or somewhere else?
Apparently, the Mines are literal mines, and the slavers are using the slaves to mine gems for some reason. I had assumed the slavers were in the business of simply catching and selling slaves, not putting them to work, but it seems I was wrong. At this point I don't expect the economics in this or any FoE story to make even a lick of sense, so I'm just going to roll with it. The slavers round up slaves and have them mine gems, which are apparently valuable, but not as valuable as the worthless bottlecaps these retards all use for currency. Got it; let's move on.

Anyway, since the conversation is apparently over for now, P-21, MG and the foals run off once again to scavenge more supplies or whatever, while BJ stands pondering the futility of her latest undertaking. However, she can't quite shake the feeling that she's not alone in the room. It turns out that her suspicions are justified:

>Something shimmered faintly as hooves clattered on the teacher’s desk top. Then a long, thin rifle barrel appeared from thin air, pressing right against my forehead. This close, I could make out the faintest of blurs in the air.
Yada yada yada, it turns out to be a zebra sniper wearing some kind of invisibility cloak.

>I had to admit I was impressed and scared out of my gourd at the same time.
This sentence is bad and you should feel bad.

Anyway, BJ correctly deduces that the zebra is not a threat, since he has an obvious advantage and could have easily killed her multiple times by now if he'd wanted to. He introduces himself as Lancer.

>“Okay, Lancer. Like I said. I don’t think you want to kill me. I’d rather not kill you.”
>“Liar,” he said quietly. “All ponies do. It is what you live for.”
>“Of all the shit going on my life, you’re telling me I’m going to get killed over a war that was over two centuries ago?”
>“The war is not over. The Remnant persists,” he answered.
Is there any particular reason BJ would assume the war is Lancer's motivation for thinking this way? Given everything we've seen in this setting so far, it's not hard to imagine a casual non-pony observer reaching the conclusion that killing is what ponies live for, with or without any knowledge of the war.

Anyway, BJ doesn't really want to fight this guy, but at the same time, he's holding a gun on her. When MG and the foals return to the room for the second time in like fifteen minutes, BJ takes advantage of his momentary distraction and disarms him. However, he recovers quickly, and they end up in whatever the equine equivalent of a Mexican standoff would be. She proposes a truce. The zebra reluctantly agrees, and they both lower their weapons.

>“Right. So. Like I said. I don’t want to kill you. I’m pretty sure you don’t want to kill me.” I looked out the window and gestured to the mine with my head. “In fact, I bet you’re here for the same reason I am: free the slaves?”
I get that she's trying to reassure him of her good intentions, but is there any plausible reason why she should assume this? The most likely explanation for his being here is that he just wants to loot supplies.

Unfortunately, the conversation gets rather silly from here. Lancer asks Blackjack if she "serves the stars." Naturally, BJ has no idea what the fuck he's on about, though we can probably assume it has something to do with that wacky zebra religion from the first book. She tells him that no, she doesn't serve the fucking stars. He then asks her whom, if not the fucking stars, does she serve? She explains that she serves the idea of making things better. The zebra accepts this explanation, and agrees to help her free the slaves. Glad we got that all sorted out.

Anyway, at this point, P-21 returns with the cowboy hat and jacket that BJ asked him to fetch. She now explains her moronic plan to disguise herself by putting on a hat, gain the trust of the Pecos, and then something something free the slaves. However, in her defense, she's not completely retarded: she tasks this zebra she just met, whose loyalty she has absolutely no reason to trust, with sitting on a nearby roof and covering her with his sniper rifle.

She now asks everyone in the party to turn over all of their booze and cigarettes, and then heads for the door. On her way out, one of the foals warns her that the zebra is not to be trusted:

>“He’s a bad zebra. The Remnants… they do terrible things, Blackjack,” the filly said as she shivered.
I'm assuming the "Remnants" are another one of these goofball factions, probably some kind of holdover from the war.

>>376658

The foal continues:

>“We can’t stay here. Soon as we can, we’re gonna run. Robots won’t chase us far if they catch us at all.”
>“But where will you go?”
>“We got a place over near Chapel. We’ll head there.” She pointed with a hoof along the railroad tracks.
I will once again protest that there is no clear reason why these foals are tagging along with the party in the first place, or why any of them came to this school. If the foals have a hideout in Chapel, wherever that is exactly, then logically that would have been their destination after the dragon episode concluded, just like the party's next logical destination should have been either the Miramare Air Station or Flank.

>I stepped back and let her run down the hall towards the stairs. The other three peeled out of their hiding places to follow her. Great. And now my mane was itching again.
What is the deal with her mane always itching, anyway? Does she have lice, or is it supposed to be some kind of indication that she senses danger? Since she is almost constantly in danger and her mane is almost constantly itching, it's a little hard to tell.

Anyway, whatever; the Crusaders take off, so I guess we don't have to worry about them anymore. I'm still not sure why the author decided to include them in this episode at all, since there's no logical reason they should even be here and they didn't really contribute anything, but we'll put a pin in that for now. The scene ends in a page break.

>I was not a smart pony. For example, none of my plans were completely pulled together. There were little gaps here and there that I had to fill in on the fly. Actually, if you looked at all my plans, that’s how they generally ran. Nice strings of improvisation piecing together a tiny bit of solid reasoning. This plan was simple: send the Pecos off on a wild parasprite hunt to the north. It wasn’t always just because my brain was being lazy, though. Sometimes, it was because that no matter how well you plan, you’ll always hit that point where everything falls apart.
Wait, the plan is to do what now? Send the Pecos up north? I thought the plan was to put on a hat and pretend to be one of them while the zebra you just met trains a sniper rifle on you. I'm hella confused rn. Oh, whatever; her zany plans are still better than any of Littlepip's.

So anywho, BJ leaves the school, presumably dodging the killer detention-robots somehow, and makes her way towards the strip mall where the Pecos are hiding out. On the way, she hears gunfire, though it is not directed at her. However, in addition to a penchant for zany, convoluted schemes, it turns out BJ also share's Littlepip's inability to avoid sticking her nose where it doesn't belong, so she diverts herself off course to go check it out.

It turns out that the gunfire she heard was a fight between two ponies and a radscorpion. The ponies are having trouble aiming because it's getting dark out. However:

>Me? I had enough radiation in me that I knew exactly what I was aiming at!
So...I guess she's still radioactive for some reason or other, and...being radioactive somehow improves her aim? I'm hella confused rn.

Anyway, whatever; there's a brief scuffle, but ultimately the radscorpion is dispatched without incident. One of the ponies is stung during the battle, but as luck would have it BJ has some antivenom on hand, so she administers it.

>I pushed the mirrored glasses a little further up my muzzle as I checked the earth pony’s breathing.
Wait, she's still wearing those sunglasses? At night? Why?

Anyway, whatever. At this point, a searchlight on one of the guard towers suddenly lights up, and one of the guards jokes that he shouldn't have bet on the scorpion. The implication here is that the guards could have intervened in the fight, but chose not to.

>There was laughter, and then the voice warned, “Get back to your hole, Pecos.” A bullet smacked into the dirt at our hooves.
Wait, aren't the Pecos and the slaver guards supposed to be on the same side? I'm hella confused rn.

Anyway, whatever. Blackjack introduces herself as Marigold, which is the same fake name she gave the robot principal of the school that she was just exploring for some still-unexplained reason. So, I guess the plan is still to put on a hat and pretend to be a Pecos? The two ponies who had been fighting the scorpion introduce themselves as Dusty Trails and Tumbleweed. They also provide a bit of explanation for what is going on in...wherever the hell they are, Brimstone Falls I guess:

>“Well, you want my advice? Keep walking. Being a Pecos is hell out here. It’s fun enough when you can strut around in Flank, but we’re getting screwed in the worst ways here.”
>“Oh yeah?” My mane prickled like crazy. “How so?”
>“You just saw it. Sidewinder’s got his protection racket, but he gets the caps and we get left out here for weeks. We’re supposed to deal with the trouble, but all we really get is bashed around by those bastards at the mine, the critters in the waste, and any slaver looking to up their quota.”
From the explanation earlier, my understanding was that the slavers were conducting some kind of gem-mining operation, and the Pecos were providing protection. It's sounding like that's still more or less the case, but there seems to be some animosity between the two factions. This Sidewinder character I'm assuming is the leader of the Pecos, and it sounds like he takes the lion's share of the profits while the grunt soldiers get stuck doing all the fighting. However, if that's the case...why even stick around? If they're not getting paid, and the slavers are so unappreciative of their efforts that they casually shoot at the ponies who are supposed to be protecting their operation...what exactly is the incentive for the average Pecos to keep putting up with the abuse? Why not run off and find another faction to join that pays better? Why not just murder the slavers and take over their operation? This makes very little sense.

>>376659

Blackjack and the two Pecos ponies make their way to the strip mall:

>The strip mall had to be getting its power from somewhere, as neon light poured into the cracked parking lot. It wasn’t a town, per se. I couldn’t see ponies raising families here. It seemed more like a glorified hangout for the Pecos.
Yeah, I mean...isn't that exactly how it was described earlier? What were you expecting to find? According to the Crusaders:

>They’re just a gang outta Flank. Not as crazy as raiders. They usually work protection for the slavers.
So what exactly was BJ expecting to find here? A permanent settlement with families and kids? Does not grok.

And speaking of things that do not grok:

>“Yup. We’re not ‘licensed’ with Paradise, so better not be near the mine on your lonesome. They’ll invite you in and then never let you leave.” She sighed, “But being a Pecos is better than being solo, or so I keep telling myself every damned day.” I gave a grin and prayed to Celestia she didn’t ask me why I happened to be on my lonesome.
I'll once again restate my objection that this whole arrangement seems like a pretty bad deal for the Pecos. They are underpaid, underappreciated, and they run a daily risk of being captured and enslaved? Seems like there are easier ways to make a living out here.

Also, Blackjack brings up a pretty good point: why aren't these two more curious about her origins? I mean, there are all these reports on the radio about a mysterious unicorn mare with a black and red mane who goes around murdering slavers, right? And then one day, this mysterious unicorn mare with a black and red mane suddenly shows up near the slaver colony and is all like, "Hello there, fellow Pecos, could you please explain everything about being a Pecos to me, even though I am a Pecos like you and should already know all of it?" But no, this mare couldn't possibly be a suspicious character. I mean, she's wearing a cowboy hat, right? That means she's a Pecos, even if we know every Pecos around here and have never seen her before. Makes perfect sense.

>“I’m gonna go lay down, Dusty,” Tumbleweed said, the brown mare giving me a grateful smile.
Is she gonna go lay down the law? If not, then Tumbleweed is gonna go lie down.

>There was something in her vacuous eyes that bothered me. She kept… twitching. And swallowing.
Oh, you say that about everypony with vacuous eyes who's always twitching and swallowing. How about a little trust?

Anyway, they all go into the saloon, and BJ joins a card game. As they play, Dusty Bottoms tells BJ her life story. It's a pretty standard deal: her parents were caravan traders, until one day her father did business with some raiders who slipped a landmine into his backpack. He kerploded, and after that Dusty was captured and enslaved. She spent her formative years as a sex slave/housekeeper for some kindly old mare, who willed her to her granddaughter after she died. However, the granddaughter didn't have much use for a sex slave/housekeeper, so she set her free. Dusty then ran off to pursue a life of being a rootin' tootin' outlaw.

Once she finishes telling her story, the rest of the Pecos at the poker table tell theirs. They're basically all just variations on the same theme, so there's no need to go into detail here. However, the author slips in a seemingly-important tidbit of information: apparently, there is still a functioning power supply somewhere in this city, which one of the Pecos was able to hook up to the strip mall. This seems to clear up the mystery of how the neon lights were functioning. More to the point, this power source seems to have something to do with The Core, which has been mentioned a few times now.

This part seems especially relevant:

> “But yeah. They buried all kinds of stuff underground. Folks might not realize it, but Hoofington’s a fucking fortress. The whole city was designed by the best minds at the M.W.T. and Stable-Tec. The zebras seemed so dead set on destroying the city that they had to. At the end of the war, Hoofington was getting attacked by the hour. Zebras wanted it bad, but they never took it,” she explained as she drew four cards with a soft hiss of disappointment. “Now the underground is ghoul territory, and worse. Drives the Steel Rangers crazy, not being able to get at all the tech buried down there.”
Presumably, BJ will end up exploring this area at some point.

Anywho, it turns out these rootin' tootin' outlaws aren't quite as retarded as they seemed at first. They manage to guess that Blackjack is a Stable pony, yet for some reason don't make the connection that she's also the famous Security mare with the 10,000 bit bounty on her head. Maybe they're not quite as rootin' tootin' as they seemed at first, either. In any case, BJ manages to bluff her way past them with a mostly-true account of her backstory, which they seem to accept.

>“So why’d you join the Pecos?” Dusty asked me.
>Technically I hadn’t. “I dunno really,” I said, thinking. If I had to join the Pecos, why would I? Then I looked at the bottle of whiskey, the cards, and the ponies around me. “Guess so that I wouldn’t be lonely any more. Have a life like I did in 99.”
You know, this actually brings up a pretty good point. Why doesn't she just join the Pecos? They seem to lead a merry life, apart from the radscorpions and the shitty wages and the constant threat of slavery dangling over their heads like the sword of Damocles. And on top of that, this gang clearly isn't all that hard to join. From what I can tell, all you have to do is show up at their hideout wearing a hat and they immediately accept you as one of their own. Seems like joining up with them would be a fair sight less complicated than...whatever she's trying to do here, exactly.

>>376658
>At this point I don't expect the economics in this or any FoE story to make even a lick of sense, so I'm just going to roll with it
You'll spare yourself by doing so
>>376659
>she's still wearing those sunglasses? At night? Why?
So she can so she can keep track of the visions in her eyes?
You knew it was coming
Without knowing your method of drafting these posts, would you consider it disruptive if someone were to occasionally step in and summarize sections? I can't imagine you're in a hurry to take any longer than necessary in scaling the entirety of this

Can Crapflap and her friends really claim killing Slavers is "Self-Defense" if they go to the Slaver place full of Slavers with the explicit goal of shooting Slavers and freeing their property, maybe even collecting bounties put on Slavers for being Slavers by anti-Slavers in another location where Slavery is illegal?

It all seems rather videogamey. That location on your map is full of bad guys who love doing bad things and if you shoot them all you're still a hero.

No consideration given to the economic forces behind slavery. No consideration given to the setting's resource scarcity. Are the Slavers people forced into working for slavers because the alternative is to raid civilized places for your daily food and water, or scavenge areas full of enemy scavengers? Have the anti-slavery poners tried to build a functional society where people can find honest work and learn valuable trades without needing to be wandering thieves, armed organized thieves, slavers, or slaves? Are the Slavers working for the greater good of the Wasteland by forcing the weak into back breaking labor to solve post apocalyptic problems and build a sustainable future long term? No, the slavers are ugly edgy bad guys who go mwahaha and Littlepoop- I mean Crapflap is totally justified in going on the warpath and invading their territory and gunning down every last one of them and sending caged poners on their way like videogame NPCs who vanish when out of view.

>>376750
>No consideration given to the economic forces behind slavery. No consideration given to the setting's resource scarcity
GG just came around to "the monetary system is retarded, just go with it", don't you start on. Besides, Somber at least has the presence of mind to separate the slavers from the Pecos, giving insight into the idea that "hey, not all the antagonists and non-heroes are mustache-twirling comic book villains".
You might consider having nuance like that, ya know. If you were a writer that is, just saying.

>>376663
>Without knowing your method of drafting these posts, would you consider it disruptive if someone were to occasionally step in and summarize sections? I can't imagine you're in a hurry to take any longer than necessary in scaling the entirety of this
I don't have any objections I suppose, though I will probably still continue to slog through the story at my own pace. I don't expect to finish this any time in the near future one way or the other.

>>376662

>A bit later, the game broke up as Big Red and Harbinger left. I needed a little bit of air, so I stepped outside… and into the faint drizzle. Not even really rain. I looked down at my hooves. Was there still power underneath me? Even after two centuries and the bombing? Hoofington was like a country within a country. Lots of secrets are buried here. Hoofington’s a fucking fortress. I looked to the north at the faint green glow in the distance. Secrets. Why did it feel like EC-1101 was burning a hole in my leg?
We're reaching levels of foreshadowing that shouldn't even be possible.

>A buck lay on the porch outside Twister’s, his muzzle pressed into a filthy plastic bag reeking of dung. He inhaled deeply over and over again, twitching.
Apparently, the Pecos have discovered the magic of jenkem.

Anyway, Dusty and Blackjack step out of the saloon, and their conversation continues:

>“So, guess you’re not one of Sidewinder’s more clueless spies.”
>“You thought I was a spy?”
>“Showing up in the middle of the night? Asking questions like you do? You’re something,” Dusty said with a grin as she looked up at the clouds.
Swing and a miss, Dusty. It seems that Somber is continuing yet another of kkat's established tropes: if you have an extremely dumb protagonist who needs to get away with doing something that is extremely dumb even by her already extremely dumb standards, just make sure that everyone else in the story is slightly dumber than she is.

On the other hand:

>“Dusty, how do you feel about slavery?”
>“Why do stable ponies ask the dumbest questions?” she asked in turn with a sigh and a frown. “It doesn’t matter how I feel. Slavery happens. It’s not even the worst thing that can happen to a pony. Ghouls losing their minds? Going crazy and turning into cannibals? Mutating into some creature? Being torn in half by waste critters? There’s a thousand and one ways to die. Wearing a slave collar is somewhere in the middle of that list.”
>“But is it okay?” I pressed.
>“It happens. Who cares if I think it’s okay?” she retorted with a frown as I pressed my luck. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”
I'm actually going to go ahead and revise my previous statement. I'm sure the author didn't intend it to be read as such, but Dusty's speech here is honestly the closest thing to a common-sense worldview I've ever come across in the Fallout: Equestria universe. Ten points for Gryffindor.

Unfortunately, though:

>“What if you could?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
>She stared at me, now looking scared. “Who the fuck are you really?” I just looked at her, pulling off the glasses to look straight into her eyes. She shook her head slowly. “No… fuck… no… no you’re not… no fucking way…”
It seems the last horse has finally crossed the finish line, so to speak. The hat might have fooled her for a few seconds, but Dusty can no longer deny what is right in front of her: the mysterious stranger who showed up out of nowhere, looking exactly like the "security mare" everyone is talking about is, in fact, the security mare everyone is talking about.
[YouTube] Dramatic Look [Embed]

So anyway, despite the momentary glimmer of sanity, this conversation is back to being a "who is the biggest retard" contest. So: who is the biggest retard? Dusty, the rootin' tootin' outlaw, who is just now figuring out that the stranger who showed up out of the blue wearing an obvious disguise is actually the infamous Security Mare? Or Blackjack, the infamous Security Mare, who went to the trouble of disguising herself as a rootin' tootin' outlaw, only to end up immediately blowing her own cover just because she can't shut her fucking yap about the ethics of slavery for thirty goddamn seconds? Cast your vote now.

>“No… I can’t… fuck… no! How-- how the fuck can you do this?” she hissed as she paced back and forth. “You saved my fucking life. You saved Tumbleweed’s too. How the...” She clenched her eyes shut as she sat and thumped the sides of her head. “This is some fucked up booze dream and I’m going to wake up right the fuck now.”
>I put a hoof on her shoulder. “It’s not a dream. It’s a chance to do better. I can’t guarantee it’ll work. In fact, given how my plans usually go, I’d be fucking scared to death. But it’s still a chance for a free life. For you. For those slaves in the mine.”
>Dusty Trails closed her eyes, raising her face to the clouds as the rain drizzled along her muzzle. Finally she pulled off her hat and sighed as she glared at me. “Fuck…”
My apologies to anyone who actually voted. As it turns out, they're both completely retarded. Blackjack, having just blown her own cover for no good reason, now proposes to Dusty that she betray both her employer and her fellow rootin' tootin' outlaws, in order to join this insane pony she just met on her non-paying quest to liberate some slaves or whatever, because morals and stuff. Dusty, whose mind appears to have been temporarily short-circuited by the revelation that Blackjack's hat was a lie, decides to do exactly that. Though, to be fair, it's not exactly like she is giving up an especially glamourous life or a lucrative career; she's basically just abandoning one bad deal in favor of another.

There is a page break. When the new scene opens, we learn that the entire Pecos gang has heard about Security's infiltration of their camp, and have rushed off to collect the bounty. However, it seems that Blackjack somehow fooled them into thinking she had gone east to Flank, when she actually went north towards the mine. So, they are all off on a wild goose chase and will apparently pose no further threat. The author provides no explanation for how she managed to pull off this little ruse.

Anyway, she follows one of the trains into the mine, accompanied, apparently, by Lancer, Morning Glory and P-21. Not sure when they joined up with her or how, but whatever; I guess we'll just roll with it. Lancer snipes some guards, and they sneak inside.

>>376771

P-21 and Glory go off to loot stuff or whatever, and BJ sneaks upstairs to some room where some guard is typing something on some terminal. He has what appears to be a slave mare chained up next to his bed, presumably so she can read him bedtime stories and help him wake up in time for work in the morning.

>He turned to spot me in my security barding and his hoof reached for the band.
So she changed back into her security barding? When did this happen? In order for BJ to get from where she was at the end of the previous scene to where she is now, a lot of stuff would need to be happening off-camera.

First she had to trick the Pecos into running off to Flank, and while the author never clarifies it one way or the other, I would assume she employed Dusty for this. Next, she would have had to go traipsing across the radscorpion-infested desert, go back to the school, sneak her way past all the robot guards again, find her friends inside, and change back into her barding. Then, all four of them would have to sneak past the robot guards yet again, go traipsing back across the radscorpion-infested desert, and then sneak up to the railroad tracks, which is where they are when the scene opens.

Granted, most of this is fairly rote and it makes sense for the author to skip over it. However, it's also a lot of action; Somber really ought to have at least included a brief summary explaining how they made it from point A to point B.

Anyway, whatever. She beats up the guard but doesn't kill him. Through their conversation, we learn that the mines have actually been taken over by someone called Gorgon, who has apparently made slaves of the slavers. Everyone involved in their operation, including the guard and his bedmare, have to wear bomb-collars that kerplode if they stray too far from the compound. He also has the power to turn anyone he looks at to stone; hence the name "Gorgon." Oh, also: the slavers appear to have some connection to Sanguine, the boss behind Deus and his crew.

>“So. Strong. Bulletproof. Turns ponies into stone. Anything else?”
>“He can fly?” the mare offered. I facehoofed. I just had to ask, didn’t I?
Every time a fanfiction writer uses the word "facehoof" in a story, a cute little pony is savagely beaten, raped and murdered. Only you can prevent these senseless tragedies from occurring.

Anyway, BJ goes back downstairs to where P-21 is trying in vain to pick a lock. BJ uses a key she found on the guard she just beat up to make the job a little easier. Inside the closet is a huge cache of weapons, to which they naturally help themselves.

>There were energy cartridges for Glory and a strange pointy pistol-like object that smelled of ozone, so I guessed it was an energy weapon. I tossed it to her as well, and she gave a little squee as she immediately swapped out one beam pistol for the new weapon.
Every time a fanfiction writer uses the word "squee" in a story, an adorable little doe-eyed filly is brained over the head with a rock on her way to school, abducted, and passed around by Haitian migrants. Only you can prevent these senseless tragedies from occurring.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, the gun she just found is a disintegration pistol. So they have that now. BJ asks if any of them have ever heard of this Gorgon character, but none of them have. She then explains that he is a horrifying monster with big, nasty, pointy teeth, who can turn you to stone with a look. She suggests being prepared, because presumably they are about to fight this thing.

>I looked at P-21. He nodded. “Zappy zappy disintegration fun from above?” Glory, still embarrassed, gave a nod.
Every time a fanfiction writer, or anyone at all, uses the phrase "zappy zappy disintegration fun from above" in any context, your waifu is splashed in the face with acid, stabbed in the eyes with fondue forks, skinned alive, salted, slow-roasted over an open pit barbecue, splashed in the face with acid again, and then forced to watch all of the Haber episodes in one sitting, with no snack or bathroom breaks. Only you can prevent these senseless tragedies from occurring.

Anyway, they strap up, and head down into the mine proper. On the way, they pass a bunch of unsettlingly realistic-looking pony "statues." Eventually, they come to another guard station. They murder all of the guards and continue onward until they reach a gigantic pit mine, where a bunch of zebra and pony slaves are digging up gems and whatever. There is a big dragon skeleton in the center of the room.

From his description, Gorgon appears to be a giant cockatrice. He is sitting on a pile of bones and gems and stuff, watching his minions toil, when he suddenly notices the interlopers and attacks them. They all scatter and begin firing while trying not to look directly at him.

For some reason, Gorgon is also bulletproof and explosion-proof. They keep shooting him and throwing bombs at him, but nothing seems to kill him. Morning Glory gets turned to stone at one point. Then, Lancer and P-21 are turned to stone as well. Things are looking pretty grim for our intrepid heroes. Well, actually, we're down to just one hero now.

BJ spends several schizophrenic paragraphs pondering what she should do. Ultimately, she concludes that since being reckless and stupid got her into this mess, then continuing to be just as reckless and stupid should get her out of it. She shoots out all the lights in the room, there's another scuffle, and then yada yada yada, she pushes him into a rock crusher and that's the end of him. Fortunately, all the ponies he had turned to stone turn back to normal after he's dead, including BJ's friends.