/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW2SeY4m6A8

>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