Streets of Trotson
Day 2
“So, how in tartarus did you manage to piss off most of the wasteland?”
When I had said those words, I hadn’t expected Sharpshot’s immediate response to be to freeze up. Having stepped in front of him, I looked at the ghoul perplexed. He chuckled, started walking in a manner best described as sheepish, and shook his head. I couldn’t tell if there was shame in that laugh or walk, but the embarrassment was clear enough. It was interesting and quite odd; I had imagined the wasteland’s most wanted stallion to be a lot different from what I was getting.
I wasn’t quite sure how long we had been walking at the point I asked that, but it was long enough for the music blasting via his PipBuck to become background noise. The only times I paid it any mind was when the music stopped and the radio mare, DJ-PON3 as they called themselves, spoke. I remember Medicine Ball would find literally any opportunity to listen to them, infatuated by their voice to an almost unhealthy level. Listening to them brought back… interesting memories of the mare. It was definitely the reason she went to Manehattan.
“So you know my reputation,” He said, though his words felt more like it was meant for himself than me. “Of course that is the case. I can’t have one pony who does not learn who I am and what I’ve done? Can’t the wasteland give me that?” He ended his little rant by ramming the butt of the abomination into the road. That seemed to calm him down. “So, any faction or settlement in particular you want to know about? It would be easier to list who I haven’t pissed off than who I have.”
“Well, I can guess what is going on with Unity. I can’t imagine having Willow trotting around does a lot of good for their cause,” I told him, not taking notice as the trotting of my hooves suddenly changed at the start of a new song. I became perfectly in sync with its rhythm and had started doing more of a prance than anything. “Considering all of the ponies you have on your bad side, the fact the Grand Pegasus Enclave seems to be the opposite is strange.”
“As I tell everypony, it’s a long story,” He said, shrugging. “Lets just say they helped me, I helped them, and we both got something we very much wanted. For me, that was Willow’s freedom from her owner.”
“Oh yeah, that has been mentioned a few times now,” I replied, turning my head away from the ghoul. I didn’t notice the intrigued look that he seemed to have on his face. “I doubt that you managed it by just killing ponies. Sure, it would make you a nuisance, but most of you grounders are that anyway.”
“You say that word far too casually,” Sharpshot muttered, rolling his eyes. There was silence for a couple seconds, then he spoke up. “You’re correct. I mean, Willow and I’s relationship was enough for the Goddess to want me dead. Sometimes all you have to do is free some slaves or reveal some secrets. Wastelanders can get touchy.” He laughed. “If you want the most interesting story, it’s how the Steel Rangers came to hate me.”
I raised my brow, leaning my head in his direction. “It’s more than just taking some technology from them?”
“Let me put it this way: I’m a ghoul. A ghoul with two pieces of unique, old world tech at my hooves,” he said, tapping both his weapons against himself. “A ghoul, with old world tech, who in an odd moment of doing more good than bad for the wasteland, decided to kill an elder of theirs. Not the best look, even if the stallion in question wasn’t exactly sane.”
A couple of blinks, and I looked away to hide the fact that I was impressed. Elders might as well have been the leaders in the Steel Rangers now that the Ministry Mares were gone. They were well protected, but at the same time were soldiers themselves. Killing an elder was no small feat, and while the first two parts of Sharpshot’s small story would create tension between him and the Rangers, that last one would burn any bridges that could ever be forged. It showed skill, but also the danger of having a pony like him around; it could easily make things harder.
“How did you do it?” I asked. “I’m certain you didn’t just waltz in and blow his head off.”
“It would have been rather funny, you gotta admit,” Sharpshot said, doing his best to hold in the urge to laugh more at my statement. I would never admit that he was correct. “If you must know, it was a decent amount of time ago. The Bucklyn Bridge was actually still fully standing at the time and, well, it would take forever to explain why we did it.” His gaze was lost in the distance, a mix of joy and pain in his voice. “Let's just say it has to do with I.M.P., a cast out Steel Ranger, and a bunch of other shit. We stormed their base on the bridge, doing our best to spare as many of them as possible, and I got the final shot in. Nearly died that day… and a friend of mine did.”
I turned to him for just a moment, and then looked back in front of me. “My condolences.”
The most recent song stopped, a new one began, and once again my canter changed. This time I was very much aware of it, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was a woeful acoustic guitar piece, the singer different from the mare I had heard just before. I had never heard it before, but had quickly synchronized all my movements to its beat. The casual mention of the wasteland and other post-war things made me realize that what I was listening to was more recent. I didn’t expect ponies to still be writing music nowadays down here, but I wasn’t going to complain.
In fact, I have to admit that I was really enjoying it. The music of the wasteland had such a different tone to that of what anypony would hear above the clouds. The joyful, rock-like notes that I was used to were replaced with acoustic, single-instrument ballads of the ruined world. It put a large, genuine smile on my face that no pony but Anchor and my foals knew was possible. There was a hint of surprise on Sharpshot’s face as I practically pranced my way to our destination. It was only when the song stopped and DJ-PON3’s voice hit my ears did that smile and prancing fall away.
“On the spectrum?”
My eyes widened, looking at Sharpshot. For a moment I was surprised that he had managed to pick that up just from how I had been acting. Then I remembered he was from a Stable, possibly the only place in Equestria where I would expect knowledge of things like that to survive. After briefly wondering if it was okay to divulge that much to the stallion, I came to the conclusion it wouldn’t do any more harm than telling him my name would already do. The ghoul had earned a nod from me for his detective work.
“Wasn’t diagnosed until I joined the Enclave proper,” I explained. “Parents didn’t care enough about if I was or not.”
“That makes two of us then… except I was diagnosed rather early,” Sharpshot replied. I could hear the smirk he was wearing through his voice. “Glad to meet another neurodivergent out here.”
I considered my possible responses, and then spoke. “The feeling is mutual.”
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Our journey stopped at a theater that, according to the MentaBuck, was known as Alibi Street Cinema. Of all the places I had expected them to camp out in, it certainly wasn’t what I had expected. That made it a great choice, as it likely kept them off the radar of ArcanaTech and wouldn’t be somewhere a group of raiders might choose to hang out around. Sharpshot seemed to know what he was doing, which perhaps wasn’t surprising considering he had been living with a gun under his pillow for who knows how many years.
I also couldn’t deny that I had some interest in seeing what lied inside. Cinema was a wartime development, half used to fuel propaganda against the zebra menace and half to offer relief from the war. When Equestria died, so did cinema. Not even the Grand Pegasus Enclave made use of it anymore, what film we had long since used. Either that or it was blown up when Las Pegasus destroyed itself with its own balefire bomb. The point was, it was possible something might still be preserved and watchable. Chances were rather low, given both the damage the balefire had done to Trotson and the time that had passed.
“Here we are!” Sharpshot replied, a hoof going at wide as if he was a tour guide from before the war. “Enclosed enough where we’ll know raiders are there before they know we are here, but open enough to not cause Willow’s claustrophobia to set in.” He turned his head to me. “Pegasus thing, right?”
“Oh yeah, she did mention she was a pegasus, didn’t she?” I asked rhetorically, mind flashing back to her mutilation of the burned raider. “I guess it’s nice to have a former member of my tribe with me.”
Sharpshot showed me inside, opening the door like a gentlecolt. The inside of the building left his action somewhat absurd, considering the inside looked as lovely as a hangover. The decay that rotted all of Trotson was here as well, and I suspected time had turned much of it to dust. The concession stand was either filled with things far too disgusting to be considered edible or straight up dust. The curtains that darkened the theater behind said stand had been dissolved into nothing by time and the hunger of insects. There was also a pony behind what I had to assume was a ticket counter, knowing they didn’t have a spot in one of Stable-Tech’s bunkers. Personally, they had been given a fate far kinder than what some ponies experienced in stables.
The lights were out, predictably, and when the door closed the outside and light from Sharpshot’s PipBuck became the main source. It was far more eerie hearing our hooves echo in the cinema compared to the apartment complex. There was far more light and the space was more cramped, but the light outside didn’t reach into the main theater room. It was almost completely pitch black, save for right around where the blackout curtains should have been.
Left was the restrooms, and right led to a door reading staff only. With the darkness of the theater properly repelling me, I turned my attention there. I could feel Sharpshot’s confused gaze on the back of my skull, but I ignored him to satisfy my curiosity. Better to do so now rather than later when it was more than possible we could be in danger. The door wasn’t locked too, and as I entered I finally looked back at the ghoul staring at me.
“You two check up here?” I asked.
Sharpshot shook his head. “No reason. E.F.S. was clear so we just let things be.”
His faith in Stable-Tech’s systems concerned the soldier side of me. An uncleared building was not a safe one, and it gave me the perfect reason to check the upper floor. I made my way up the stairs located on the other side of the door, ready for maybe a feral ghoul or something like it. At best there would in fact be nothing, but a soldier never expected the best. That was how ponies got killed.
The stairs led into the projector room. A gemstone had been lodged in the door, cracked to the point I could scrap it off with my hooves. It was a talisman of some kind but I have no idea what kind it was. My best guess was on some sort of preservation talisman, probably placed for something like a fire and not a megaspell. Given its state I figured the film reels and projector it was trying to protect would be beyond the point of usable.
To my satisfaction and shock, I was only half correct.
Opening the door showed me a room that seemed half as aged compared to the rest of the building. It still didn’t look clean, but the rot and mold had not infested it to the level of Whickerbury Apartment Complex or the main floor. Film reels were scattered on the floor, some in far better shapes than others. The projector was facing down into the main theater, and not far to its side was a terminal. The green light from its screen made things a lot more visible then they otherwise would be.
“See, nothing to worry about. I get the mentality but Stable-Tech stuff is trustworthy in its design,” Sharpshot said from behind me. He walked to my side and eyed the room around us. “Huh, didn’t expect it to look this good up here.”
“I’m gonna see if the projector works.”
“Oka– wait, why?” He asked, tilted his head at me.
I hadn’t fully made it to said projector before my hooves stopped working, his words hitting me like bricks. I looked down at my hooves – at myself – and realized that I was acting in an odd way. I was a soldier on a mission, and that mission should have been my focus. Instead I had somehow found myself intrigued at the thought of seeing the remains of a world I had no attachment to. The surface I was calling dangerous and scary was feeling… nostalgic, maybe? Either that or it was feeling more like home than the Enclave had throughout my many years.
Realizing what was happening, how I was acting, and the realization that in the span of only two days I had shown more emotion to strangers than I had in the past few years, I panicked. That panic only made me panic more as I realized that I was feeling panicked. My hooves started to do a dance and my mind went into overdrive as I tried to figure out why I was feeling this way. I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t figure out why I suddenly felt more like a pony than I had in years, and everything about it terrified me.
Then a hoof laid itself on the back of my neck, and another curled around the bottom of it. I snapped to the face of the pony doing it, my mind instantly believing that it was Anchor. I was instead left stunned as I saw Sharpshot doing something that I thought only my ex-husband had been capable of. The touch of hooves calmed me, allowing me to regain myself. Thinking clearly, I lifted a hoof to my head and groaned.
“You okay?” The ghoul asked me.
“Yeah. Just a panic attack, I guess,” I told him. I looked to the door, then to the projector, then to the door. “It’s… it’s safe. No enemies. We should go down where–”
“Let’s check the projector.” Sharpshot butt in. I looked at him with more disapproval than I had a lot of things in my past two decades of service. “It’s what you want to really do, so we’re doing it.”
I looked away from him. “It’s not mission critical.”
“You're a Dashite,” he stated. Those simple words caused my heart to twist. “You can’t go back. This is your home now, so you are gonna enjoy it.”
“What gives you the right to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do?” I asked him. My entire body felt tense.
“Other than the fact I’ve lived for over a century and have seen and experienced more than you will ever in your lifetime?” He asked rhetorically. He walked around me and used his own body to block the door. “I’ve seen dashites and stable dwellers live and die. I know how the smart ones stay alive in a new, different environment.” He shook his head. “A trusting of the gut, a willingness to explore and learn. These ponies take the chance to learn their environment, and you are trying to talk yourself out of doing just that..”
I looked at the projector, a small piece of me considering what he said. “It’s all pre-war, it won’t tell me anything about the surface I don’t already know.”
“Yet you still want to view it, don’t you?” Sharpshot asked me, chipping away at my patience and excuses like a sculpture. “Something made you interested in this. What is it?”
I wasn’t sure how to counter that. As I did my best to find the most effective and indirect way of saying “it doesn’t matter”, Sharpshot stood there in contempt. He had me, and I knew it no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise. I felt pathetic knowing that a walking corpse had the upper hoof, and the fact I could feel his shit-eating grin under those rags made it only worse. I was a ticking time bomb, one he had expertly wound up over the course of the day.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
It took one simple sentence to make me explode.
“I guess the little miss soldier is a lot more pathetic than she made herself out to be.”
With no second though, rage formed listening to that cockiness for the entire day, and a newly wounded ego, I snapped. I spun around, walked over to Sharpshot, and my hoof found his haw. A quick, powerful right hook had sent him stammering to the side, but he didn’t fall over like I expected. I had managed to hit him in just the right way where his mask had come off, allowing me to see his gull expression. To my shock he didn’t frown or get angry, but instead obtained a smile so wide it could not be considered natural.
Then he started laughing, shaking his head as a hoof felt his muzzle. I looked at the bottom of my hoof, and then at myself. His laughter grew, my heartrate picking up at the volume of anger he had managed to get out of me. The curiosity and panic I had felt could all be categorized as one-off events, but this anger wasn’t. It had built too naturally, and the way it lingered in my body made me worried. As I looked at Sharpshot desperate to find some way to call it unnatural, I found that he was still laughing at the punch I had given him.
“I knew it. I fucking knew it,” he said. He flashed an ugly, toothy grin in my direction. “You're definitely that idiot's descendant. No pony besides Star and Dead ever hit me that hard.”
I didn’t pay attention to the names he dropped, being too wound up from his words. “How did you make me do that? You put some kind of spell on me?”
“Miss, I may have a big magic pool but I’m not a spell caster. Precision as a talent doesn’t cover much outside of really easy telekinesis for spell casting,” Sharpshot explained, walking away from the door and sitting down in the center of the room. “Mind magic is way out of my league. That anger was all you, and it was absolutely beautiful.”
I stood there looking at him, my voice only able to find a single word. “Why?”
“I would like to say it was because you needed it, but I would be lying,” he explained, one hoof holding his mouth like it was about to fall off. “I just like seeing ponies angry. It’s the main emotion down here for a lot of ponies.” He shook his head, shoulders rising and falling as he giggled like a young colt. “Now, how about we see if the projector works.”
I looked at the device, having held in the urge to ask why. The anger had made me tired, and it was perhaps that reason I finally gave in to my curiosity. The question of “why” echoed in my mind, but I didn’t want to answer something I couldn’t explain. An answer I didn’t have at the time, to be completely truthful. At the time the wheels of film and the projector they were meant for just seemed like a piece of intrigue.
I looked at the projector, and then out in front of it to the well-sized room below. Rows upon rows of faded red seats faced a wall that had once been painted pure white. Now the paint was gone, and age had cursed it with a hideous brown and dark gray. It would still do the job, but it was a shame I would never see this equipment in prime condition.
I checked cables, made sure a bulb was on, and then flicked the projector on. To my astonishment, a flickering light found its way out from the projector and beamed down onto the large wall below. It was just pure white, no film put in for it to read, but that didn’t matter at that moment. It worked, and that meant that we could take a look at whatever film reels were in good enough condition to be usable. That all gave me the smallest of smiles.
“Anypony tell you that you hit like an earth pony?” Sharpshot asked, still nursing his muzzle.
“No, and I do not care,” I told him. “Now get off your ass. We got some film reels to examine.”
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Before we put any in we tried our best to determine if any of them were usable to begin with. The labels for what was contained on one was faded by father time’s cruel march, and more than a few had been far too rested. The ones we thought might work were stored next to the projector, and when we had gone through everything there were only four in that pile. Everything had otherwise been either snapped apart, rusted beyond viewability, or the film part of the reel was missing. It was to be expected given the amount of time they had simply sat there, and I considered myself lucky that we had any that worked at all.
With that it was a simple matter of waiting for Willow to meet us here. Sharpshot wasn’t gonna let me leave her out of this, and I more than had the patience to do so. That time was spent sating the hunger I had worked up with some of the provisions we had been given and checking the terminal. While I couldn’t admit it at the time, the food was some of the best I had ever had in my entire life. I knew it, and though I would deny it when he asked, Sharpshot knew it too. The surface was winning me over, and far faster than any proud Enclave member would like to admit it. It left me questioning if what I had seen on that first time to the surface was correct or not.
The terminal wasn’t as interesting, given it was mainly a list of showings and how to properly run the projector. The one thing of interest it did have was a recording on it, which Sharpshot had put into his PipBuck upon its discovery. It was one of the perks of having an actual device instead of simply having the main functions in one’s brain. When we finished eating, he set it to play. We were greeted by the voice of a stallion in what I would assume was his last fifties. He sounded pretty damn upset.
“Well, today is my last day here, and good riddance. If you found this, that means you're either a member of the Minister of Morals or my replacement. If you're the former, you listen damn well because boy do I have the juiciest bit of info for you. For my replacement, the same thing goes to you because somepony has to stop these dumbass sympathizers from getting their way. Yes, you heard me right, Sympathizers! Using a Luna damned cinema as their little base of operations!”
“Okay, technically they are not stripe sympathizers but they are members of that anti-ministry group making a name for themselves. What did they call themselves? It was something in prench. Resistance deli whatever the fuck? You know who, so I’m gonna just skip over that and tell you that this cinema isn’t what it used to be. The point is that they are recruiting new members from here, are planning something at the ol–”
There was the sound of a scuffle on the other side, the sounds of hits and grunts coming through. That was followed by tense seconds of silence, and then a voice far different from what we had heard before. They were younger and feminine, cold and yet as mature as a pony twice their age.
“The ministers plan the end of the world. They slowly bring all of Equestria and Zebrica to judgment day, and I will not stand around and let it happen. Find me, detain me, and you only further prove what we have said. The ministers will pay for their sins. You can count on it.”
It ended there, Sharpshot squirming a bit before his posture suddenly straightened far more than it had before. Whoever she was, she sounded like a very wonderful pony to talk to. Probably spent her days out on the streets preaching about the doom of ponykind. Either that or working for this anti-ministry group didn’t change that. An anti-ministry group I wasn’t even aware existed until that very moment.
I could understand why it was swept under the rug, but it showed a side of Equestria that wasn’t as great as high school history had painted it. I knew enough to know that the ministry mares were responsible for what we saw today, and that Pinkie and Fluttershy specifically made the problem worse. One turned Equestria into a surveillance state, and the other had given the zebras the keys to megaspell disaster. In hindsight it only made sense that there were ponies asking for the removal of the ministry.
“Well, mare got her wish,” Sharpshot stated, staring at the terminal we had retrieved the recording from. “Karma in the form of magical annihilation for the ministries.”
“But the cost they paid to get it was what they had feared the most,” I said. My eyes lingered on where I knew his PipBuck was underneath his clothes. “Did she get her hooves on a monkey's paw?”
“That would certainly explain our lovely little wasteland, wouldn’t it?” He asked smugly. After a moment, he forced himself to laugh. “Funny. Perhaps I should be pissed at what she said about the ministries but I can’t help but agree. We really went and fucked up the whole world.”
I narrowed my eyes on him. “We?”
“Parents were the children of ministry ponies. Father is from the Ministry of Peace side, and my mother’s parents were from the Ministry of Morals,” He explained, motioning wildly. If the motions meant anything, they made no sense to me. “I hate the ministries, and I hate them. Their existence is the cause behind so many of the things we have to deal with now tha–”
“AaaaaaaAAAAAAH!”
My eyes went from barely open to blown wide at the wail of agony below. Sharpshot shot up from where he was sitting, seeming worried and scared, and ran out of the projector room. I followed behind him, half expecting the source to be some half-feral ghoul that had not showed up on my E.F.S. earlier. I was met with something else as we reached the bottom of the stairs, something that caused me to hesitate.
Hooves clutching her neck, still screaming in sudden pain despite her body looking completely fine, was Willow. She was in tears, the foal-like voice I had heard in my head sounding almost nothing like what actually came out of her mouth. It sounded like she had been screaming forever, her eyes barely able to look at either Sharpshot or myself as we walked up to her. It was terrifying, and horribly familiar.
While Sharpshot had rushed to her side, I stared at… something. It wasn’t Willow, Sharpshot, or any other physical being but rather some banshee that had appeared in my mind's eye. I immediately recognized them, twisting Willow Wisp’s screams of agony into the death cries of soldiers and grounders that I had seen die over my years of service. I was lost in my own little world of horror, those that had been damned seeming both raging at my very being and scared of me at the same time. They were incomprehensible, but my mind put in words that a part of me had wanted to hear.
“YoU dId ThIs!” My brain made them say. “YoU kIlLeD uS!”
At the time, I was so lost I did nothing but agree. Not even Willow’s telepathic voice in my head could wake me.
“It hurts Sharpy! It hurts so much!” She cried out. She sounded as if she was going to die, but I could barely register her. “Everything… everything hurts.”
If anything her words seemed to make the voices in my head worse. The real and imaginary fit together too perfectly, creating a loop I couldn’t escape. My eyes didn’t register the room any longer, and my mind felt like something was trying to rip it from my brain. I wasn’t sure how long I stood there, but I didn’t care. The world had locked me in a mental torture chamber, and I didn’t even tried to escape. I felt I needed this.
I felt I deserved it.
I was awoken to the realm of the living by a slap to the face. It wasn’t anywhere near as hard as the one I had given Sharpshot, but the pain was enough. The ghoul took center place in my vision, silencing gracing my ears. Willow was getting back onto her hooves behind him, the look of pain on her face saying that whatever had caused her that pain wasn’t gone. I would have kept my eyes on her, but Sharpshot gave me several extremely light blows to the face several times when my eyes trailed too far from his.
“Stay with us, soldier mare. The lands of imagination can wait,” he told me. He only stopped when I blocked an incoming hoof, pausing for a moment before backing away. “Wasn’t expecting you to go all “thousand yard stare” on me there. You good?”
“Peachy as Pinkie,” I retorted. I briefly looked at Willow, one hoof rubbing her throat. “Any clue what happened.”
“Don’t need clues. We’ve been dealing with that for a long, long time,” he explained. He looked to his wife, and then to me. “I think it’s best if she explained.”
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It took some time for Willow to feel comfortable up in the film room, both due to claustrophobia and how much pain she seemed to be in. Though she had stopped messaging her throat, there was this feeling that she wasn’t comfortable. Her eyes seemed ready to bring forth another wave of tears, the smile she wore unsteady and incredibly false. The strange part is that it was the same smile she had worn around me all day, and it got me to think if those ones were just as fake. The answer would only come once the couple started to explain.
That explanation started with a simple question from Sharpshot. “Soldier mare, how much do you know about killing joke?”
“Nothing. I have no history with it, and I don’t know anypony who has ever dealt with it,” I explained, having laid myself down to rest. I could still faintly hear the screams of the damned in the back of my head, calling for my decapitation. “I know it exists, and that it's nasty. That is pretty much it.”
“Well, in that case, remember how you mentioned a monkey’s paw earlier?” He asked me. I gave a nod to the stallion. “It’s like that. It twists your words and uses them against you. I won’t use an example for my own safety, but the plants are literally killer jokes.”
“My former owner was a very bad pony who killed a lot of ponies. He made me kill a lot of ponies too, and to protect myself I learned to enjoy what he made me do,” Willow said, her head resting on the floor. Her body was curled against itself tightly, and I could see she was terrified. Seeing an alicorn afraid seemed just as anomalous as the rest of Willow’s existence, and put me on edge. “He liked the quiet, so I would talk his ear off to spite him. He could have just detonated the collar I had on, but he needed me and didn’t want to go through the process of purchasing and training some other pony. Then, one day, I made a comment about how not even my throat burning would stop me from talking.”
Her eyes closed, a long, heavy breath escaping her nostrils.
“Worst mistake of my life. He didn’t need me anymore, so he forced killing joke down my throat. Suddenly everything just… it hurt!” She sounded like she was in pain again. “My throat wouldn’t stop hurting. Everytime I move my neck or head, everytime I swallow, and everytime I try to speak I’m greeted with pure agony. It never stops. Even with painkillers it doesn’t completely go away. I’m living in constant pain, and the only thing that keeps me going some days is having Sharpy at my side.”
“Oh goddesses,” I whispered. “A plant can do that?”
Willow nodded her head, and I felt my entire being go pale. Now that I was aware of it, I noticed the way she moved her neck. Her muscles looked as if they were constantly working, constricting and almost twitching in some aspects. There was also the consistent motion of swallowing, as if Willow was trying to get a piece of food out of her throat that was lodged inside. I was pretty sure there wasn’t anything stuck there; she hadn’t eaten in the entire time that I’ve known her, as far as I was aware.
“You… have my sympathies, Willow,” I replied, trying to think of the pony before me not as the terrifying alicorn I had expected her to be, but the frail pegasus she was at her core. Imagining her as one of my own made the act of apologizing a lot easier. “I wish there was something I could do to help you.”
“Even if you did, I wouldn’t want it,” she replied. Her words caused my eyes to go wide. “The killing joke sucks but it's also the only thing keeping me out of her hooves.”
“Her?” I questioned. Neither gave me an answer, giving me a look that said “figure it out for yourself”. After a bit, I had an answer that should have been somewhat obvious. “The Goddess.”
“We made a gamble years ago, before the Goddess made herself known to the wasteland. Don’t ask how we found her, it’s a long story,” Sharpshot replied. His eyes went back to the saddlebags near his flank again, that same look he had the last time he looked at the gracing his eyes. “Basic version is we were approached for something good we did. She said she could help Willow, and that becoming an alicorn would break the killing joke’s effect. Mainly she just wanted a test subject.” He shook his head. “Clearly the killing joke didn’t find that funny.”
“There are no other voices in my head, and I’m still truly myself,” Willow explained. “I’m a defect. They want me dead, and they want Sharpshot dead for knowing I exist. If the killing joke is removed from my body, it’s entirely possible that my assimilation into the Unity will be finished.” She closed her eyes, a single tear falling from her face. “If that happens I… I might kill him.”
Words evaded me, as did coherent thought. The number of ways I wanted to say sorry to these two, despite the fact that they were grounders, wouldn’t put into justice how I felt. It was both heartwarming and heart wrenching at the same time, and I could barely imagine what Anchor and I would do in that same situation. The room suddenly felt too small, and my wings felt like there wasn’t enough room to spread them out. I got to my hooves, trotted in place a bit, and then made my way to the door.
“I just… I need to step outside a moment,” I told them both. “Need some clean air.”
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Inhale for three seconds, hold for one, and then exhale for five. It was a simple yet effective technique to calm one's breath when under stress, and the air in the cinema wasn’t enough. I had to step outside, there was no choice. Everything that had happened in the span of the past hour had me wound up like clockwork. If I didn’t calm down, it was too likely that I might somehow do something stupid.
The small moments of believing the wasteland wasn’t as bad as I imagined were thoroughly buried. Hearing Willow’s story terrified me, the knowledge of everything she had been through made me sick. Her story of persevering by finding Sharpshot was beautiful in a way, but everything around it felt unbelievable. Ponies in the Enclave didn’t need to go through all of that just for the one they love, and they shouldn’t have to. I felt bad for them, having to live in this environment.
I felt bad for surface ponies!
My first time on the surface in the Enclave, we had killed a bunch of raiders. That was the kind of pony I expected to be down here, and the kind I was use to killing. When I was only here for missions and deployments, the idea that grounders could be so much like myself seemed nonsensical. I would probably question their loyalty to the Enclave and remind them of what I had always seen as the truth: we were the last pure ponies of Equestria. Amazing how quickly that line of thinking made me feel like a foal.
I sat against the door to Alibi Street Cinema for who knows how long. The unnatural quiet of Trotson filled my ears, the wind rarely making itself known. Perhaps a gunshot or something would ring in the distance, but I didn’t feel on edge. I was starting to trust the E.F.S.’s word that there were no hostiles around me, and so I closed my eyes. Taking in the feeling of everything around me, I reminded myself of the one thing I still felt was true.
“I’m a soldier of the Enclave. My brand doesn’t change my love for my home,” I muttered to myself, expecting nopony to hear it. Even as the exceptionally quiet sound of static graced my ears, I believed that. “Nothing you’ve seen changes that fact.”
“In a way, I can see that loyalty as admirable.”
I opened my eyes at the sound of a new voice, expecting to see a pony. Instead I was greeted with the form of a Sprite-Bot hovering not far in front of me. I stared at it, and it stared back at me in silence. With a sigh, I inclined my head and looked up to the blue sky above me.
“I’m hearing voices now,” I said. “I must be going crazy.”
“I would say you are a lot less crazy then most ponies in this wasteland,” the Sprite-Bot said. “After all, it seems you’ve already made two friends down here. Sharpshot and Willow are rough around the edges, but trust me when I say they are good ponies.”
“Okay, this is actually happening,” I told myself, shaking my head. I looked at the Sprite-Bot, expression turning to stone. “So you are some sort of sentient robot?”
“No. The Sprite-Bots are just my eyes and ears in the wasteland,” he said. It had to be a he, though I’ve most definitely been wrong about that in the past. “Call me Watcher. I’m sure you probably feel rather well prepared for being down here, but I figured even a Dashite like yourself might need some advice for the wasteland.”