War has changed, but Sunrise Stardust has a plan to make Equestria great again. He simply needs to stage a coup in his overpopulated home of Stable 177 and place his wife, The Overmare's Daughter, on the throne. Then he must lead his Black Stars gang to victory after victory against the Tribals, Raiders, Slavers, and worse who made the Equestrian Wasteland their home. When not building walls and farms and fortresses, he must do battle with foes common across the Wasteland and threats local to this region, every major conquest snatching more land from this Feudalistic society of Raider Lords and monsters. Finally, he must take back Baltimare, the heart of pre-war Equestria's steel industry, granting him the supplies needed to properly arm and armour his ragtag gang. All in under two months, for that is how long they have before Sunrise's wife opens the Stable Door up, expecting to meet a successful Sunrise Stardust and a world cleansed by holy flame.

Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, there were two regal sisters who ruled together and created harmony in all the land.

To do this, the eldest used her Unicorn powers to raise the sun at dawn.

The younger brought out the moon to begin the night.

Thus, the two sisters maintained balance for their kingdom and their subjects, all the different types of ponies.

Then, everything changed when the Zebra Nation attacked.

For as the two sisters made their country great over the course of their long and prosperous reign, lesser countries became resentful. The ponies relished and played in the day Princess Celestia brought forth, and slept peacefully during the nights under blankets of stars painted by Princess Luna. Meanwhile, Griffons were still clawing each other's throats out over petty disagreements regarding who could sit on the biggest throne atop the highest peak of the tallest frozen, barren mountain. Dragons were still goading each other into reaching new and ever-greater levels of stupidity by day and sleeping atop mountains of stolen treasure by night. Zebra tribes were still attacking each other, casting imaginary curses upon each other, throwing spears at each other, killing each other, exploiting and enslaving each other, and killing each other, as if the whole species had decided to hold off on that whole "Leave the Tribal Stage and enter the Civilization Stage" thing until only one backwards tribe remained on its continent, and that tribe would be left with no excuses and no scapegoats. How funny it is, in that case, that the final Zebra tribe, Zebrakind itself, simply decided Ponykind and its accursed damnable oh-so-wicked kindness, generosity, and desire for all to prosper in a fair and just society should be their new scapegoat.

Say what you will about Griffons, their foul moods, their poor tempers, their frequent heats, and everything else that makes them what they are, but they at least have some accomplishments to their name, even though their culture and its fetishization of material possessions and how tough you can act in public suffered a complete societal collapse when, if experts are to be believed, their king lost his shiny idol of shininess and with it, the respect of his Griffons. Without the virtues of honesty, loyalty, laughter(Could somepony remind me again why this one wasn't given a more specific yet dignified name, like optimism or heart or cheer?), kindness, generosity or the magic of friendship, the whole species descended into the worst depths of greed and egotistical selfishness, constantly suffering at the claws of its own kind while what goods each Griffon hoarded and kept from circulation served no purpose to the greater whole.

Zebras, on the other hoof... Do they have an excuse? Did they ever have an excuse? What can excuse the things they have done? Was there ever a point in history when they were anything more than what they were on the day the Megaspells were cast? When that dark day is the high point of your species as a whole, what does it say about your species and the land it occupies? How could their culture collapse when they had no culture to begin with, their "Trained" soldiers could still easily pass for common thieving and raping bandits and pirates, and their tyrannical totalitarian mad king was a monster that ordered the deaths of Wonderbolts and Foals alike, still stuck in that stone-age "Be the biggest monster or the bigger monsters will get you" mentality?

I'll get to them later. In any case... for the longest time, things were great for the ponies of Equestria. It's just a shame Ponykind's greatness never extended beyond its borders. Perhaps, if other beings were ready to accept friendship into their lives, things would have turned out differently.

One fateful day, Nightmare Moon was turned to the dark side, determined to make the night last forever. Princess Celestia handled this in a single afternoon, sealing the magically-corrupted being away in the moon for a thousand years. Experts believe the "Seal within X" function of the Elements of Harmony can only designate a duration in increments of a thousand years. Despite how short eternal night lasted, the Zebra Empire decided this one scary day was the perfect catalyst for some new scary stories to keep the other Zebra foals up at night. Some new Porquoi story to tell the stupid foals why you didn't get eaten by Jaguars in the forest or attack enemy tribes at night, and why you instead slept in mud huts at night. And that subspecies decided the stories of an evil night monster with stars that were actually far-off lights glinting and glimmering on the edges of alien superweapons simply must have been true, because other Zebras said it was. I swear, Sheep would laugh at these things if they knew how.

One thousand years later, Nightmare Moon returned. The brilliant Twilight Sparkle squashed this threat in under an hour before a single pony died from the horrible famines everlasting night would cause, seeking out the other five Elements of Harmony and purifying the magic-induced corruption from Nightmare Moon's body, turning her pure once again. Despite threatening to destroy the world, and attempting to do so, solely to sate her own ego and wounded feelings, Princess Celestia forgave her. After all, this was something Nightmare Moon tried to do, not Princess Luna. And Princess Luna... She was not furious at her sister for sending her to the moon, she was apologetic for forcing her horn, for putting Princess Celestia in a position where she had to choose between her friendship with her sister and her duty to her ponies.

The two made up, and everything was fine.

Then, everything changed when the Zebra nation attacked. Only the Elements of Harmony, masters of Honesty, Loyalty, Laughter, Generosity, Kindness, and Magic could stop them. But when the world needed them most, they fucked up.

There really is no way to put a more positive or eloquent spin on that, and to use a less vulgar term would be a disservice to the enormity of their mistake and the lost lives of all who suffered because of it. They fucked up, and then everything went to shit. The Elements of Harmony were magical warriors, not politicians or researchers, and certainly not experts in matters of war by any stretch of the imagination. This was something few of them were ready for, certainly not whoever was responsible for those stupid dedicated designated polka-playing machines. Experts believe one of those Ministry Mares even descended into drug addiction, the degenerate. They would not be ready to manage something of this scale during the best of times, but during a global crisis such as the Zebra Problem?

Simply put, while the Elements of Harmony could remove magical corruption, they could not remove the darker, more subtle evils, evils that were, for some beings, normal. They could not purge the evil from Zebrakind.

Some Zebra operatives posing as "Experts" claim that the war between Equestria and the Zebra Empire was actually started by ponykind. These "Experts" then argue against the necessity of that war, and repeatedly insult Equestrian society for thinking its virtues of harmony and friendship were in any way better than the virtueless and worthless society of Zebrakind, as if the simple tribal doctrine of "Look after one's kin" could possibly have an edge over a society that naturally looks after its own without needing the tribalist mentality to offer "If you do this, you get to lord it over the ponies" as a reward. I'm glad those spies were silenced by the Ministries before their lies could fool any fools. But even if those "Experts" were correct, I point to the economic position Equestria was in, and then, I ask: If I found a group of ponies in a desert, dying slowly from thirst, would it be moral of me to charge them all the money they and their families and everypony in their country of origin had for the life-giving liquid their bodies depended on? Would it be moral for me to charge them so much money, it put them into a lifetime of debt that would ensure they would spend their lives financially enslaved to me? Would it be moral for me to charge them so much, the younger mares and stallions of their family would have to whore themselves out to keep up with the ever-growing inflation on the loan I would give them, so that they could afford my water? Would it be moral for some of those ponies to attack me and try to take the water by force? If they did, would it be moral for me to wipe the whole group out in self-defense? If no fighting broke out, and if the group's leader politely insisted on a better price, or begged for one, would it be moral for me to attack him over the perceived insolence, or kill a few hundred of his country's soldiers while he was forced to watch? At the end of the day, that was why the war had to happen, and why the war got so bad so quickly. Ponykind needed coal from the Zebra lands, but they still thought they could solve all their problems with friendship and kindness. Ponykind was ready to drag the planet and everypony onto it into a bright new future of prosperity and magic, and they forgot not everypony... Well, everypony wanted that, but they forgot not everyTHING wanted that. Meanwhile, a culture that had barely left its tribal ways of killing and exploiting and enslaving other tribes saw a new tribe it could exploit, the tribe of Po-nee-kind. And while necessity may have started the war, morality continued it and escalated it.

I doubt I need to remind anypony what happened to the Wonderbolts that died at the hooves of the Zebra "Pirates" the mad Zebra king harbored and aided. If that king was not corrupt, if that king was not evil, he would have helped ponykind take those pirates down for making his species look bad. And that's me being Equestrian and assuming the Pirates somehow able to kill Wonderbolts weren't actually drugged-up potion-chugging Zebra soldiers all along. And then, there's Littlehorn. I doubt I need to remind anypony what happened to Littlehorn. Go on, blame a simple miscommunication for the inherent evils of Zebrakind, claim the poor idiots just didn't know better. Blame a language barrier in a world where translation spells exist and ponies would happily give you a "How to speak Equestrian" book if asked. You probably wouldn't even need to visit a library. Which is good, because all those libraries lie in ruins right now, thanks to Zebras. Blame circumstance. Blame a misunderstanding. Blame the whims of fate that put genocidal Zebras in charge of stupid, cowardly, genocidal Zebras that would rather massacre a school if asked than turn around and shoot the monsters of a higher rank. Blame anything other than Zebras themselves, or the culture they followed, if you are so inclined.

Some actions... Some actions set a precedent.

If your neighbours swear, it's ok for you to swear when you demand they stop before foals have their innocent ears forever tainted. If the foe you are fighting fights dirty, it's ok for you to fight dirty, because you need to end this fight one way or another before he causes serious damage to your body, and on a moral level, he must be punished for his evil. If the rules of Hoofball are changed, even this change occurs in the middle of a game, you need to adapt to those new rules and win, not stay stuck in your own ways and complain about your opponent's "Cheating", then insist you won a moral victory by losing the real battle and letting down all who relied upon you for the sake of your feelings, be they gamblers or fans or your foals or anypony else who put their trust in you and expected you to do whatever it took to win.

And yet, time and time again, despite the ever-escalating evil actions of Zebras, including but not limited to disguising their soldiers as unaffiliated pirates and attacking cruise ships in international waters to take ponies hostage in Zebra waters, so they could massacre the captured civilians and the small covert team of rescuers sent to rescue these victims without upsetting the cruelly-grinning and black-hearted white-striped demons always searching for an excuse to claim they were oppressed and wronged and therefore owed more free shit from this planet's piggy bank...

Even massacring schools full of foals, because Littlehorn was only the first school those Zebras got at...

For fuck's sake, remember that time the first megaspell was used to heal everyone involved in a certain massive battle we've all heard enough about, saving the lives of the wounded and fleeing? Even though Ponykind had won the battle for this location just before their own Megaspell hit, Zebras chose to use their suddenly-healed bodies to resume the fighting and continue trying to kill ponies. Letting Zebras live means Zebras will try to kill ponies. They can be our slaves, our students, our lowest-class labourers and our underlings, but never our friends or equals. If you give these creatures the means, they will seek to destroy you for their own benefit. When ponies rule, Zebras are obsessed with minority rights, and when Ponies are minorities, they have no rights. Giving Zebras the gift of life was a mistake the universe made, and we were fools to repeat it that day. But still, despite the pure evil of Zebrakind, ponies never responded in kind. Ponies never sunk to their level, even for a second, even though they would only have to do so temporarily, to destroy the mad brute before they could go back to their songs and sciences, and allow their foals to grow up in a better world without Zebras. Ponies never acted like Zebras.

Zebras might claim we did, but Zebras claimed a lot of things during the war. They weren't born with powerful wings or mighty horns, so they evolved lying tongues and simplistic minds incapable of feeling guilt or shame over lying and stealing and exploiting the weak. Their favoured method of damage control to claim Littlehorn deserved it. Yes, they claimed Luna's little school was a secret training ground for the next generation of dangerously powerful battle mages, full of eeeeeeevil dark magic getting forced into the heads of poor mindbroken foals that needed mercy-killing, and burning down this school full of unarmed civilian foals too young to fight and too young to be forced to deal with Zebrakind's bullshit and too young to die was somehow justified. How could such an atrocity be justified? Those spies and allies to terrorists claim everything Zebrakind did before or after their excuse was always justified because some cowardly idiot Zebras fleeing their homeland got caught and killed by Luna's guards for illegally crossing a border while being both complete and utter fucking war criminals, and members of the Zebra species, a species that showed the world what it was worth in Littlehorn shortly afterwards.

Zebras do evil because they know it's wrong and they like hurting others. Or, Zebras do evil because they're too stupid to understand why hurting others and doing evil is wrong.

Either Zebras are dangerously evil, and should be wiped out for the good of the world. Or, Zebras are dangerously stupid, and should be wiped out for the safety of the world. If you disagree with either of these statements, look outside.

Outside... where the skyscrapers our ancestors toiled in the sun to build have been reduced to charred husks, their corpses picked at by scavengers desperately searching for their next meal in a world where food should be as plentiful as love once was. Outside, where the trees their ancestors toiled in the sun to plant have been smashed apart and wiped away, to never again give shade or shelter to Ponykind. Outside, where the land their ancestors fought for and died to protect is scorched, salted, and saturated with the accursed, unspeakably evil taint of Zebrakind.

Outside, where the end result of showing kindness to your enemy is evident, a scarred world giving us all one last grim reminder: You can't trust a Zebra as far as you can throw the grenade that should be thrown to kill them, no matter how far that may be.

The Griffons claimed they waged war to gather wealth and glory, and they were our "Greatest ally" in the war until they weren't, and Zebrakind paid them to turn on us. The Pegasi went from our protectors demanding tribute to some of our oldest friends and greatest warriors, until the day their descendants in Cloudsdale shamed them. The Dragon Lord Torch shaped inhospitable and infertile land and a populace of greedy fools into one colossal fortress, all to protect his treasures.

And the size, scale, and tactics of those conflicts will never be seen again.

As lone wanderers, mad tribals, and rabid beasts outside these walls fight with all their might over the last scraps of meat on the carcass of a dead world, one thing is clear.

War... has changed.

-Sunrise Stardust, Age 8 – Zebras, Not Even Once.

Excellent work, as always! I see you learned much from my lectures. It's nice to see a foal as rational, mature, patriotic, and honest as yourself. If only some of the adults in this Vault were as patriotic as you! In addition, I see you're still working on your problem with run-on sentences. No matter, I'm sure you'll improve with time. Your usage of adult language was shocking, but it seems that was your intention. Still, avoid overusing such foul language, for the more it is heard from one mouth, the more of its presence and shock value is lost.

Top marks.

-Chalk Marks, Teacher of Class 7.

Somewhere in the Equestrian Wasteland, under a black-charred sky, in a lonely building in a ruined city that stood like a wordless grave marker for those who died there, an old cassette player was still playing the old, forgotten song near the skeleton of the one who'd chosen to loop that song.

"My little pony, my little pony…"

All was silent and still in this monument to death, and the singer's long note rose alone in an echoing hell, miles away from me.

Me, I was somewhere else, miles underground and ready to change that.

But first, some backstory.

Because I haven't frontloaded this damn story with enough exposition already.

And there's a degree of intentionality with that.

After all, why should I frontload and bookend every single chapter with a ton of self-congratulatory warning labels about the 'Oh-so-dark' content of this story interspersed with tearful pleas for the readers to turn away from this tale...

...When I could instead drive away many, many more readers by frontloading this story with something I wrote when I was practically a baby, followed by a brief explanation of who I am, followed by those infuriating little warning labels I just complained about, followed by an impenetrable and seemingly-neverending information dump about my world and the technology we take for granted and the incredible power of OATS, and so on and so fucking long before my story actually gets on with the war and death and horror and misery and incredible story of a hero's war with a seemingly invincible, omnipresent, and neverending evil?

Still, at least I know to leave the information revealed in a certain mystery vital to the story out of this infodump. The mystery I didn't even know existed when I wrote that paper for some class I took. I barely remember this, but I'm told my answers were good enough to impress my teacher and get me a "Recommendation", a chance to visit the higher-society floors and begin to climb my way up society's ladder. Which is good, because at the time, while my love for Equestria was genuine, I only hated Zebras because I had been taught to do so. I'd never met any myself.

But before all of that...

Before the lies, the war, the death, the horrors I saw both inside this prison and outside its walls...

I was a young lad, too young to have any solid memories or thoughts prior to this, when I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and what I wanted to be.

I wanted to be awesome.

I wanted to be incredible. And when I was young, it was so easy to swear to myself that I'd do whatever it took to become incredible.

And the path to becoming awesome seemed so simple. Read a lot, work out a lot, but not too much, schmooze some higher-ups when the time was right, get good at Robot Fighting in the Tec-Sec, get good at the games played competitively in the Tec-Sec, get rich, get a gun to wear openly and a secret way-better gun to hide away from the world, learn an instrument, make the greatest band of all time, write a ton of amazing and catchy songs… It all seemed so easy when I wrote it down on imaginary paper using an imaginary quill pen in my own mind, so long ago.

Even before I fully understood the world and my place in it, even before I wanted to reshape this world and change it for the better, even before I learned enough about the Equestria of old and longed to bring it back...

I wanted to be remembered.

I wanted my name in the history books.

And you can see for yourself how that turned out. That's why I'm writing this. I want to tell you how all of this went down, from the start. Read on, unless you're too young to hear words such as pussy and fuck and other terms I try to use sparingly, as everyone knows overusing them dulls their fucking impact. I believe that when they come out of nowhere, like a smear of crap on an otherwise-nice painting, that's when they're the most noticeable. But on a painting of shit, who'd notice one more smear of the real thing?

In any case, this isn't a tale you can tell your foals, or your grandmare. Unless your grandmare is into sweeping epics with more words than half her literary collection combined, horrible equine violence, great wars, clever tactics, mighty military magic, and cute ponies getting stupid manestyles and worse Cutie Marks only to die like mutated flies at the hooves of cute and traditional and moral ponies with guns. But you certainly can't tell your foals this story, not with how degenerate things get at times. This is a tale I personally consider for mature mares and stallions only, because it's got a lot of violence and more than a few bad words. This isn't a tale you will have heard before, and it contains many revelations about the world I come from, and what happened to the world that created my own. This tale might not be a tale that'll ever get told outside of this book. This is a tale of love, of hate, of hope and hopelessness, of victory and defeat, of great gain and greater loss, of war changing constantly and yet never truly changing at all. This is a tale with many words, many names, many faces, and many lives lost. This is a tale of great heroism, and great evil. This is a tale of brilliance, horror, glory, victory, failure, the past, and the future.

This is a tale of… Oh, to hell with this!

I'm sorry, but to be honest with you, I always hated it when the characters in a work of fiction started to talk directly talk to you, the reader. Even if it was only for one scene, at the start of the story. Even if it took place in a documentary, historical or censored or embellished or even practically fictional for all the creative liberties they took, I still just couldn't fucking stand it. It always felt so pretentious, so condescending. Like the writer thinks he's doing something clever by kicking your willing suspension of disbelief in the nutsack and calling it insufficient. Having characters not only talk directly to an audience that can't talk back, but berate that audience and bloody order the audience to consider this story deep and realistic and serious. I hated it more when the scene included some self-indulgent 'This really happened! This is a true story, I swear! It happened to me, and it could happen to you too!' disclaimer, which it often did, whenever the books that I've read in my lifetime felt like getting 'Meta', a word which here means... Well, Meta is just a code word in pseudointellectual literary circles for 'Too lazy to try and maintain the reader's suspension of disbelief and unjustifiably smug about being that lazy about such a vital part of the literature-reading experience, plus far too smug about doing something obvious and uncreative or entirely stupid and unjustifiable for the sake of seeming clever'. Even when the disclaimer was modified to something slightly more plausible, such as 'It could have happened to me! Maybe! And it could happen to you too! I'm writing this from the perspective of someone who researched these events a lot and seeks to recreate them faithfully, so if anything seems stupid or contrived or poorly-written, that's why!" or 'These events happened, I only changed the names of the people, and assorted important places, and some dates!' or stupidest of all, that 'This really happened, in the universe that I am from! I am going to sell this book in your universe for profit, and to warn you about morality and stuff!' nonsense. I still found it distasteful. But most of all…

Most of all, I hated when stories would tell you, right at the start, that in the end, the hero wins. Or loses. Either way, it's annoying. It kills the tension, and your ability to put your doubt aside and pretend the writer might actually kill the main character off halfway through an absurdly long story. Or might not do so. I have never, in my life, read a book that pulls any of these things off well.

Perhaps that's also why I hate stories written in a first-person perspective so much, and why I swore to myself that if I ever wrote a story about my life, I would write it in the Omniscient Third-Person Perspective, writing about scenes I wasn't there for by using historical records, first-hand and second-hand accounts, and many other methods of information-gathering. I was also really tempted to edit the scene after this one, forcing it to include a moment that never happened, a scene in which I tell some other pony all the important information a new reader might need to know about my world and everything important within it. It would certainly feel a lot more organic than a character just talking directly to the reader. I even had a plan on how I'd give you an infodump about Pip-Bucks: I'd write about myself talking to another pony about the latest Pip-Buck models, while arguing over the features different models had and which one was better. Then, some other pony would show up, and we'd debate ideology and philosophy and the lessons we should take from our history. And it would seem so natural, you wouldn't even notice that we were talking about events every foal learned about as if we were explaining them to an audience who didn't even know the difference between Laser and Plasma weapons.

And if you don't know the difference, Laser weapons are like guns but better, as they fire armour-penetrating beams of intense light instead of little lead chunks with built-in explosive 'Primers' in them. Unfortunately, they tend to lose their cutting edge and penetrative power after travelling far enough, losing their light's focus to the moisture in the air or something. I'm no Laser weapon expert, I just have friends who are. Anyway, good thing the strongest and most expensive-to-produce magical lasers have built-in ways to get around and reduce what a downside their range problem is. Plasma weapons are stronger and slower, firing big, unstable blobs of green energy that miss what they're aimed at more often than not. But if they hit you, you're fucked. It's like being engulfed in boiling acidic lava that magically magnetizes itself to life it touches and legitimately hates you. You can dodge a Plasma bolt, but you can't dodge light. But while a plasma bolt is deadly from any range, even miles away, a laser will only scorch and wound you instead of ripping a hole in you if it's formed far away enough. Then again, plasma blobs are far easier to see coming and dodge when lobbed from far away, but it's possible to snipe a foe with a sniper rifle from such a great distance that the bullet can arrive before the sound of it firing does. Don't get me started on noise-cancelling magical enchanted silencers. Those things erase all sound your weapon makes, even the sounds of it reloading. You could use the damn thing as a club to beat a foe to death and it'd still make no noise. Those magical silencers are rare for a reason. Either way, both types of Energy Weapons tend to take the same types of ammunition: Energy Cells. Or MicroFusion Cells. Or Electron Charge Packs. They usually take one of those three energy types, so it makes logistics quite a bit easier.

Yes, I had many plans on how to effectively and naturally convey a few tens of thousands of words of exposition to the reader, without it feeling like you were in some kind of school, taking notes for something there would soon be a test on.

But no, I don't want to make this ahistorical. And if I'm going to tell you about who I am, what I did, and what I'm about to do… Well, I'll just have to get this bullshit over with as soon as possible.

Here I write the story of who I am, what I did, and why I did it. The story of what had to be broken, and the story of what had to be built. I will not call myself a hero, but I will also not obnoxiously wax lyrical about how I'm totally not a hero. I offer unto you everything that made my adventure what it was, everything that changed me for better and for worse, and everything else that happened in my time, so that you may come to your own conclusions. Hero or villain, mastermind or monster, a beacon of light in the darkness or another rampaging beast overwhelmed with loss in a world gone mad, I want you to decide for yourself what you think of me, but only once you have read absolutely everything I have to write in this tale.

My name is Sunrise Stardust, and this is the story of how I made Equestria great again.

First things first, I should probably tell you about Pip-Bucks. Because why tell you about the events that lead up to and caused the war when I can brag about how cool the thing stuck to my arm is?

Quick history lesson: Equestria needed diamonds after we invented tech that made useless shiny rocks into a valuable and highly expensive resource, we had tons of lower-class gems but Zebraland had diamonds, we bought diamonds and made enchanted crap and sold it to every living sentient and sapient thing out there including Zebras, and enchanted crap rules because everypony can use magic swords and magic cloaks and shit like that, even Zebras. We solved the 'Pegasi fly and Earth Ponies lift heavy stuff but Unicorns can do tons of shit the other races can never do' problem by inventing Enchanted Items any living creature can wield, items with spells stuck within diamonds on the items. We kicked off a new golden age of prosperity for the world. We were the best and Zebras hated us for that, so they started attacking us and giving us plenty of reasons to war with them, then they started the war anyway. Fuck Zebras.

Now, back to the Pip-Bucks! PIP for Personal Information Processor, and Buck for… Well, Bucks. A historian trying to earn points with the audience would say 'Buck' wasn't generally considered anything other than a slang term for colts until about seventy years before the war, when it made it into the history book along with 'Kid' even though that originally meant baby goat, and I'm no historian. I just have friends who are. Is Pipbuck, Pip-Buck, PipBuck, or Pip Bucks the proper way to spell the name of these devices? Yes. Hey, if the advertising department of the company that originally invented and sold these things couldn't be bothered to keep it consistent…

I'll try and keep it consistently spelled as Pip-Buck, except when others spelled it differently in the story. Anyway, while you're certainly going to see for yourself how great these wondrous devices can be soon enough, these little miracles can do many things. Therefore, it stands to reason that I should explain what they are ahead of time and tell you absolutely everything they can do, so it won't seem like I pulled their more fantastical capabilities out of my arse a few dozen chapters from now when backed into a corner. This is my Autobiography, after all, so it would just be weird if the readers came away from it with that impression. Anyway, moving on, Pip-Bucks are small and powerful personal computers, with incredibly advanced circuitry and runework so miniaturized that they can be worn around on your left hooves like some kind of bracelet or hoof-armour. Remarkably dense solid steel makes up their tough outer shells, bulletproof glass coats the regular glass of the Pip-Buck's LCD Display, and a plush polyester-coated leather-stuffed interior ensures that you won't mind the fact that these things don't come off unless you can find a Pip-Buck Technician willing to take it off. These things are tough, durable, and full of useful features. But they aren't invincible, so infrequent trips to the Tech-Sec's (Or was it Tec-Sec's?) local Pip-Buck repair station are an unfortunate fact of life. By Tech-Sec, I mean my the area of my Vault known as the Technological Sector, even though many other individual floors are dedicated to specific areas of science, magiscience, arcane studies, chemistry, or the less flashy kind of robotics. I'll get to that in a minute.

However, at some point, the ponies of my Vault looked at these hoof-mounted personal computers, considered marvels of modern engineering and arcane science for their time, and said, "Not good enough". So while the ponies who ran into this Vault on the day the Megaspells fell and burned the world away wore their traditional Pip-Buck 1.0s, or Pip-Buck 2000s, or even their Pip-Buck 3000s if they were lucky – Ponies stupid enough to have purchased the Pimp-Stallion 3 Billion, dooming themselves to an eternity of lugging around a gold-plated costume-jewelery-encrusted monstrosity that spat in the face of proper design sense and wallets everywhere couldn't really be called lucky, when it came to the lacking intelligence fate had cursed them with – The ponies of my Vault wore something better.

For a while, we called their upgraded form Pip-Buck 3000 Mark 2s. Then, we called them Mark 3s, and Mark 4s, and Mark 5s… And then, we went beyond the realm of adding minor ergonomic enhancements, quality-of-life improvements, minor upgrades to the Eyes-Forward Sparkle's User Interface, and an extra feature or two. We started to get into the REAL overhauls. Experimental materials, operating system alterations and 'Forks' (Alternate versions of the operating system that underwent their own developments and evolutions independently from the others), and more meant that between the infrequent releases of 'Upgraded' models with all-around improvements, we saw many more 'Sidegrades', devices that were better than the standard model in some areas and worse in others. We saw Pip-Bucks made from tougher and heavier materials, and some made from lighter and softer materials. We saw Pip-Bucks with long and thin blades hidden inside them, ready to spring out and stab somepony at a moment's notice. We saw Pip-Bucks with wires that stretched up and connected to a big chunk of computer you had to wear on your back, so your hoof only had to hold the part with the screen. We saw Pip-Bucks with bigger screens, Pip-Bucks with two additional screens beneath the main one to add the illusion of depth to everything it displayed, Pip-Bucks with no physical screens and a thin illusionary screen that floated a foot above the device and could only be seen by the wearer… I want to say the most impressive ones were Pip-Bucks with experimental and fragile screens called Resistive Touch-Screens. Transparent electrodes do cool magiscience shit between two thin layers of screen stuff layered above the thicker and tougher main glass layer, and when you touch the screen, those two thin screen layers are pressed together. More science shit checks the vertical and horizontal location of every touch to feed a number into a program constantly running on the OS, which moves a modded-to-be-invisible pointer onto the location you just touched and clicks for you. However, I remember reading about a model of Pip-Buck that allowed the user to swing it around in any attack its wearer wanted. The device would siphon some magic from its battery to 'Launch' that kinetic energy in an unstable and pulsating ball of force, which would explode upon impact with double the force of the user's swing. I wish my Pip-Buck could do that, but this feature was banned within my Vault after it was discovered. The official story was that it drained the battery at an unsustainable and potentially dangerous rate, but I personally believe our elderly whore of an Overmare just didn't like the idea of everypony's Pip-Bucks doubling as decently-powerful weapons you couldn't take away without hassle.

What was I wearing, at the start of this tale? A Pip-Buck 7000, the deceptively-named twenty-first true all-around upgrade to the original 3000 model, which was, itself, the seventh upgrade made to the Pip-Buck 2000 model. It came in models of glossy pearl-white and absolute jet-black, with a deep and metallic purple for the highlights that would be a cold shade of gunmetal grey on a factory-standard Pip-Buck 3000.

This beautiful bastard had some pretty useful features. In no particular order… It has a Radio receiver. It has a Rad counter. It can turn the user invisible for up to five minutes per day every 24 hours. And it has some features that'll take several paragraphs to explain. Which is why I'll tell you about those when I'm done telling you about my home, Vault 177. Surely, the society of the area I come from should be more interesting and more important to the story than the gimmicky features of the marvel of magical engineering on my hoof. Though, to tell you the truth, I've always been a fan of both, and I've always looked down on the school of thought that says the 'Cool Stuff' in a sci-fi story should be mere window dressing compared to the same old generic pony interaction and relationship drama you'd see in any other story set in any other time period. When you tell amateur writers 'Not to focus on the cool stuff for too long', they hear 'Don't include any cool stuff', missing one of the biggest points of Sci-Fi stories, and how the new technologies of the future change our culture and society. In addition, I suppose my autobiography would certainly make a nice sci-fi story, were I to send it back in time to double as a cryptic warning for anypony paying attention.

Vaults… Sure, they're technically called Stables, but I've always considered that a rather stupid name. 'Stables' are what the pony species called Hotels before they were called Hotels, but after they were called Inns. Hotels, Inns, Stables, these are things you can enter and exit whenever you want. You go in, you rent a room, you sleep, and you leave when you're ready. Vaults… You don't leave Vaults. Vaults are reinforced boxes you put your valuables in, to protect them. Sure, you could say the pre-war idiots thought giving these bunkers such a cutesy name would make the idea sound more palatable, but what is more valuable to a nation than its ponies, and its future? I won't change every instance of Stable in my story to Vaults, but I probably should.

If you don't know what Vaults are, these 'Stables' are underground shelters. Really big underground shelters. Bunkers large enough to comfortably house somewhere between three thousand and a few hundred thousand ponies, maybe a million tops. Metal walls, metal ceilings, maginuclear reactors to power the lights, metal floors with tiled layers on top, pneumatically-driven extra-thick airlock doors that slide up to open and down to close, bedrooms with metal-bottomed beds bolted to the floors. I hear the Vault Project was originally supposed to save ponies, which made the sad fates so many vaults met even sadder, when you think about it. Due to incompetence, supply shortages, tight funding, bad supplies, miscommunications, Zebra saboteurs, and more, a lot of Vaults ended up with stupid gimmicks.

If you're somewhat lucky, your Vault ended up a perfectly-serviceable shelter and miniature society, and nothing particularly notable happened to you. If you're slightly less lucky, your Vault was only slightly supplied short in one specific, unimportant area. If you're a lot luckier, your Vault found itself with an abundance of some particular supply. Perhaps you got double the allocated amount of something, while another Vault got none of it. If you're lucky, but it's the kind of lucky that makes destiny feel like taking risks and betting your neck as the buy-in for nothing but a pot of entertainment, your Vault was supposed to research and advance some specific facet of technology, or your Vault's ponies naturally decided to do that on their own, and the technology DIDN'T go horribly wrong/right in a way that killed everypony or made them wish they were dead. If you're unlucky, something bad happened to your Vault after the Megaspells fell. If you're really unlucky, something bad was done to your Vault before the Megaspells fell, rigging the game from the start. I remember seeing one Vault that was just… missing a door. It had no door. Its door was missing. Its door, the big-ass metal gear door that's supposed to protect you from the darkest and vilest magic possible, was not there. You could just walk into the Vault, and walk right back out of it filled with Taint, a vile and twisted type of dark magical radiation.

My Vault… Well, you could probably call us one of the lucky ones.

Stable 177. Or as I called it, Vault 177. It's one hundred and seventy higher than one of the luckiest numbers possible, one hundred higher than another of the luckiest numbers possible, and the one almost looks like a third seven. Does that make it twice as lucky as a simple seven would be, three times as lucky, or entirely unlucky? I'm not sure. I'd like to believe it's three times as lucky, but here's how it all went down. Also, screw it, I'm just going to say Vault from now on.

Vault 177 was one of between five hundred and twelve thousand big-ass bomb shelters constructed before the war, each one designed to connect to its own isolated underground network of tunnels and rooms large enough to house a decently-sized city's population, and each one… Well, most of them were hidden in defensible, rarely-seen locations. Some were hidden beneath major cities, and some were hidden in inhospitable hellzones, like the Everfree Forest and the comparatively-tamer Whitetail Woods. It's funny how that dynamic changed around, after the war. Anyway, here's a quick rundown of the geopolitical complexities of the era that led up to the Great War. I could slowly insert scenes that drip-fed you information about the pre-war era while making you wait eighty chapters before telling you everything, or I could not do that.

Once upon a time, Ponies were awesome, and they invented cool stuff. Art, music, architecture, video games, the wheel, the cart, the forge, the sword, the axe, the rifle, the revolver, the enchanted gun, arcades, bowling alleys, restaurants of every stripe and gimmick, robots, toys, robotic toys, toys that looked like robots, philosophy, science, flight, and so much more. They also discovered medicine, oxygen, nitrogen, and the magical power of things early scholars didn't even consider elements, like kindness and trust. They made cities larger than any mountain, and monuments to their own greatness larger than any city. They broke limits, they went places, they did things. Natural kindness and naturally high IQs helped the three types of pony survive alone, before the three came together to form Equestria. They were the best. Let's be real here, they were the best. They went from speaking their first words and figuring out the wolf-killing power of sharp sticks to making automated factories in under three thousand years. Who else are you going to compare them to, Griffons? Dragons? What did they accomplish, with all their sharp fangs and sharp claws and supposed 'Realistic' cynical views of the world? They didn't make airships out of storm clouds so thickened in cloud factories that they could comfortably hold Unicorns and Earth Ponies and even heavy metal cannons and plasma miniguns inside them. They didn't take gems, the most common and useless thing on the planet, and make them worth more than gold through the power of equine innovation, creating wealth while the long-lived Dragons and supposed super-tough Griffons simply hoarded what they had. Dragons and Griffons didn't build a secret and highly-advanced space program that would have sent ponies to the moon approximately eight months after the day the Megaspells fell, had they never fell. Ponies did all of that, and more.

Ponykind prospered. And they needed more resources, so they traded with the other types of animals in their world, all the types that had achieved true sentience. Not to be confused with the fake kind of sentience cows and sheep can display. They can talk, but they can't talk to you. They might sound lifelike, but they aren't truly alive. They might react normally to assorted stimuli, but there is no true intelligence in their heads. Dogs are smarter than farm animals, even though one is able to talk and the other is not, which means it's about as wrong for your dog to eat the meat of a cow as it is for you to drink the milk of a cow or eat an orange. Vegetables, fruits, these things are alive in the same way non-sentient and non-sapient farm animals are alive.

Anyway, Zebras, who had not invented anything impressive in the thousands of years they'd been around for, had been blessed by fate, but not by evolution. They lived in a place where pretty much everything was edible. Not just the grass and what you planted and farmed, because fruit naturally grew on its own, animals took care of themselves, the weather moved on its own, and you could even eat many vines growing on assorted trees. They didn't need to become more than they were a few thousand years ago to survive, so they were lazy, violent, stupid savages that ate what they could and moved on to the next area to consume more resources there. When they came across land owned by other tribes, they would attack like the savage wild animals they truly were, even if the tribe was just a bunch of fillies and mares whose husbands had left to hunt animals or forage for food. They would even attack if they were facing foes stronger than themselves, because what else were they going to do with their free time, read a book? They never invented reading, as far as the entirety of Equestrian archaeology and history are aware. They warred with their tribal rivals and enslaved them, and traded their slaves to bigger tribes for food, which they ate rapidly. They had no self-control, and all foreign aid attempts to teach them how to properly farm food and care for soil failed. They were products of their environment: strong, fast, and stupid, with no family values and only a tribal mindset that held together small communities of equally-stupid animals. Many experts believe there's something about the lack of intelligence demanded in the area that stunts the mental development of foals, and that's why the rare Zebras intelligent enough to make their way to Ponyville are occasionally intelligent enough to hold a conversation. Anyway, ponies needed Coal, so they traded with Zebras and got coal, and everything was fine until Zebras decided to have the Zebra moment to end all Zebra moments. Zebras declared war on Ponykind, they sent soldiers to shoot up a school full of underaged foals, they bullshat themselves about Princess Luna being some kind of alien moon demon, and they fired the first Megaspells. If you don't know what Megaspells are, they're these dangerous technomagical devices that suck in spells and turn them up to 11. For example, a fireball spell barely strong enough to shatter a building's glass window would find itself powerful enough to char and scorch the entirety of Canterlot. Think of them like a guided missile, only so huge, you would need a rocket launcher the size of a pre-war observatory to fire them. And some kind of powerful terminal setup to program them to lock themselves on to a city, rather than a pony or vehicle. Megaspells were invented by Fluttershy, who had been assigned a secret superweapon project by Princess Luna herself. She subtly rebelled against her orders by filling the Megaspell spell-enhancing missiles with Healing Spells and firing one at a battlefield Ponykind had just taken from the Zebras, saving many wounded ponies and countless wounded and fleeing Zebras. It was one ultimate, supreme act of mercy, and it resulted in the Zebras turning around and continuing to fight on that battlefield. Then some Zebra spies snuck into Equestria and stole some Megaspells, filling them with a type of incredibly dangerous dark magic, something called Balefire. It's a violent green fire, almost alive with its hatred for life. This dangerous energy called taint radiates off it, like heat from a campfire. Or in this case, darkness and corruption from a dark and corrupt fire. Zebras looked into the future and saw a world bathed in the stuff, so they launched their Megaspells at Equestria, not realizing that some brave Ponies had stolen some Corrupted Megaspells back from the Zebras. We returned fire with those and some Megaspells filled with traditional combat spells, and the world ended in hellfire and death, just as the Zebras had predicted.

It would be poetically beautiful, if the Zebras hadn't claimed millions of innocent lives in their final act of stupidity as a species.

There, now you know how the world ended. Zebras were stupid and they ruined everything for everypony. Now, back to Vault 177…

Vault 177 was an ordinary pre-war Vault built near a town called Baltimare. Before the war, it was a peaceful and unremarkable port town. It had this experimental piece of tech in the water named Mr Trash Wheel, and it was the next step forward after Waste Reclaimers, but I'll tell you more about that when it's relevant. During the war, Baltimare was converted into a beacon of industry, a bastion of Titansteel, Power Armour, and Warship production. It saw a lot of refugees fleeing their war-ruined regions by boat, and a lot of those refugees found work in the factories, or the nearby mines. It also had a lot of coal refineries and weapon factories, a thriving community of artists and craftsponies with family-owned stores, and the finest university in Equestria. That little number had been founded by a mare named Moondancer, a student of Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns over in Canterlot, and despite its top-tier funding and its proud ownership of Equestria's largest library, it allowed any foals to attempt its tests and apply for entry, regardless of their economic backgrounds. Some beautiful and heartwarming rags-to-riches success stories had been written in that place. In this town, if you weren't here to run your own store and make a living after mastering some kind of skill at the Equestrian Foundation for Magic and Higher Learning, or after having mastered your skill elsewhere already, you were one of the rich ponies who owned or oversaw the factories, or one of the poor ponies who slaved away in them, and life was good… Until taxes, food-rationing, and government incompetence started to bite everypony in the flanks a little harder every day. The factories weren't unsafe or anything, they were just boring to work in. Still, nothing particularly major happened. It wasn't as if this was the starting point for a grand schism in which a lot of angry and dumb workers duped by a radical ideology that steadily grew in power decided to try and kill the rich, take their stuff, and become the new rich, planning on treating themselves better than the old rich. Something like that was going to happen at one point in history, but then Pinkie happened, so snipers were ready to kill the rabid mutts while they were in the middle of planting their bombs on assorted factories vital to the country's war engine. I don't know what genius decided to put a drug-fuelled future-seer in charge of the Department of Unpersoning, Killing, Mandatory Happiness, and Covering Things Up, but it's probably the biggest reason why Equestria lasted as long as it did during the war. After all, genetically-higher chances of being empathetic aren't exactly useful traits when you're fighting a defensive war against a foe that keeps pushing for total war. If only she was healthy enough to prevent the invention that put the planet on life support. Maybe she saw it, and knew it was the best possible future for Equestria, compared to a fate in which Zebras bled Equestria dry with a big, messy war under the cruel direction of its mad king. It must have hurt, making a decision like that. I've certainly made my share of decisions like that.

Like a bullet from a gun fired into the air, early-warning sirens that normally warned ponies of incoming potion bombing runs by potion-doped winged Zebras, rather than incoming balefire missiles, sent fucktons of ponies rushing out of their homes, headed for the local Vault. If they were on the list, having either gotten a free ticket in some kind of sweepstakes or competition, having bought a place in the Vault for an exorbitant fee, or having been selected and granted a free ticket for service to the country, service to the town, great academic performance, or any other excuse, they got in. If not, they were directed to the other Vault in town, Vault 132, which accepted anypony who showed up. As long as they were a pony, though this was the case for all Equestrian vaults. After all, Zebras had their own secret Vaults in our land and colossal Vaults in their own land, and Griffons had been nothing but trouble for most of Equestria. They wouldn't be missed. The rare good nonpony migrants had been granted tickets to the Vault anyway, so it was fine.

The lucky, the rich, the intellectuals… The elite entered Vault 177 and went underground, and most of them were Unicorns. It was almost a routine after all the practice drills. You could almost pretend it was another ordinary day for that town, if you ignored the deaths of all the ponies who stayed aboveground to make sure everypony got in. I hope nopony decided to sleep through the sirens, thinking it was another practice drill. Anyway, we had ourselves a new life underground, to wait out the war as we waited for the dark magic radiation 'Upstairs' to fade away over time.

I wonder if whoever designed these Vaults planned on underground ponies reproducing like rabbits with something to prove. Well, that was life, for many years. After all, Ponykind would need more ponies when the Vaults opened and ponykind was ready to repopulate, reclaim, and rebuild Equestria.

Our Vault was a normal one. We lived, we ate food from the Food Talisman and the Waste Reclaimer that used magic to turn crap into any sanitized and edible food you wanted, we drank water from the Water Talisman that produced clean drinking water, we fucked, we got watched fucking by the Overseer - a mare selected by Stable-Tec to rule over this population of ponies and live in a designated official-looking school headmaster-ish room with walls full of screens, though we decided this Overseer and her unlimited power should be kept in check by a council of genuine intellectuals, artists, and free thinkers chosen by the ponies of our home based on their contributions to Pre-War Equestria and the Vault - and we eventually died, but our many foals lived on, and so did the many foals they would have in time. Nothing particularly noteworthy or interesting happened, unless you count the impressive advances in science our dedicated Technological Sector that began calling itself the 'Tech-Sec' developed, such as the Pip-Buck upgrades or this one thing called a 'Maginuclear Reactor'. Imagine nine washing machines together, in a cubic formation, and now imagine one big box that size, with wires coming out of it. Imagine that inside it, absurdly tiny chunks of this weird magical ore called uranium are being pulled off from the main chunk and pulled apart, unleashing the insane levels of power trapped within said metal, along with incredibly dangerous energy called Radioactivity. Around that Uranium, there's a shell of magic that transmutes the intense heat and deadly radioactivity into electricity, and wires send that electricity around the Vault to power the lights and stuff better than our old and traditional magical reactor ever could. These things were so powerful, we had to make bigger, better, and more advanced batteries just to store the excess electricity!

And nothing ever went wrong, if you can believe it. Things would go wrong, eventually, but not just yet. For the longest time, our Vault was just… boring.

Well… There was this one hallway. One hallway miles underground, which stretched further and longer than any other hallway in the entire Vault, a hallway many miles long with no side rooms or turns, a hallway that ended in the usual sliding pneumatically-powered doors you saw in the Vaults. It looked so ordinary, despite how out of place it was… And that just made it even more unusual.

This door was a door nopony could open. It had no controls, no easily-pressed Open Button, not even a puzzle that would somehow open it hidden somewhere in the Vault. Perhaps its Open Button was on the other side, ponies speculated. But what could be on the other side?

Naturally, it was a very exciting thing to talk about when you weren't fucking, or shooting at the Vault Shooting Range, or reading in the Vault Library, or working out in the Vault Gym, or swimming in the Vault Pool, or eating in the Vault Mess Hall, or sparring in the Vault Duelling Arenas or the Vault Dojo, or doing cool science shit in the Vault Laboratories, or fucking in the Vault Swimming Pool, or creating something for fun/prestige/extra cash. Sure, the stuff was practically meaningless now, but the jangle of bits still sounded nice.

And that one mysterious door seemed to be enough to satisfy the universe's appetite for weirdness in this area, so nothing weird happened for decades.

What could be behind that door? Weapons? Gold? A portal to another world? A second Vault, full of naked mares? Or perhaps, some gigantic magical device that would purge all the dark magical energy, all the Taint, from the world outside, and get rid of the thick cloud layer those cowardly Enclave Pegasi left us with, and more! It didn't really matter at this point, but the Vault's Secret Door was a fun thing to talk about.

For years, for decades, for centuries, life was good.

Then, everything changed when Vault 40 attacked.

That was where the Vault's Secret Door led. Another Vault, nestled in some defensible mountains, had been designed to house Equestria's military in this region and keep it well-fed, trained, and ready to help make Equestria great again as soon as its main door opened. Overstuffed with weapons and supplies, and no entertainment media besides war-themed books, it was almost as if somepony had set this Vault up to be what they thought the ultimate Badass Vault would be. A Ruler Vault to house Equestria's scientists and artists and rich idiots, and a Soldier Vault to house the soldiers who'd fight to protect them in the new world. It should have been a match made in heaven. However, at some point, they had undergone a coup. The Vault's Overseer was dead, and an excessively violent warmongerer had seized control of that population. Instead of training at a reasonable pace and waiting for Stable-Tec to send the All-Clear Signal that would allow the Vault's main door to open, he wanted to institute draconian training methods until he had an army he felt could conquer anything, even whatever horror he was certain lied in wait behind his Vault's Mysterious Door.

It would probably make this a better story if I waxed lyrical about horrific initiation rituals, training methods so risky they became inefficient, experimental brainwashing technology, and a secret room where young soldier mares and colts were 'Trained to resist torture' by being 'Used' by the military's corrupt higher-ups, but… This Vault was boring. It trained its ponies for combat roles, and if you sucked at those, you found yourself getting a combat support role or a weapon-making role, and if you sucked at too much at everything, you were shot. You feared getting shot, so you tried very hard not to suck, and life went on. Don't worry; we'll see plenty of spectacularly disastrous Vaults later on.

Anyway, Vault 40 sent in some Heavy Troopers decked out in standard-issue Earth Pony T-51e Power Armour (I'll tell you about that in a later chapter) and they made their way to the Overseer's office to make demands. It didn't go that well. How would you expect a war between classically-trained soldiers and academic masters of magic with a considerable tech advantage to go? They had suits of Power Armour, and we had powerful Battlemages in our Stable Security. Those things held up against bullets, not fireballs hot enough to melt you inside your armour. They had outdated Pip-Bucks, and we had modernized and upgraded models with more gimmicky features than you could shake a stick at. They had rocket launchers, and we had shielding spells, mind-controlling spells, space-manipulation spells, spells that spawn fireballs atop the head of targets in your line of sight, each one descending slowly and blasting on impact with anything, unleashing double the heat and force of standard rockets.

I wish I had some of those Battlemages in my army, when the time came for me to lead one. But I'm briefly and purposefully getting ahead of myself in this paragraph, to build up hype for when I eventually get to that part of the story.

The war ended when Vault 40 had no remaining adult survivors, only a fuckton of locked rooms full of hiding and heavily-armed foals we decided to take in and care for, after disarming them. Don't blame us, their Vault's adults were the ones who romanticized 'Fighting to the last' as the ultimate ideal a pseudomilitary organization could follow, even when it meant you left your kids behind with nopony left to protect or raise them. Anyway, we took their vault's stuff, and integrated it into our own. We didn't try to actively erase their old culture or anything, we just raised them as our own with our own ideals. 'Excellence for the sake of excellence', 'Science for all', and all that. Some took to it quite well; some hated it and wished their parents had won the war so we'd be forced to build better guns for them as slaves or something, but nopony was stupid enough to cause a fuss. Anyway, life went on, more foals were had, and decades passed.

Centuries passed.

Our Stable Security got less good at their jobs, and less moral.

Rations were reduced for non-workers, which meant if you ate what you were given by your masters, you were given fewer calories than you needed to survive. But if you had multiple foals and stole most of a different one's ration each day, you'd have plenty of food. Rations were traded like money, crime grew organized, and things got bad.

And to keep them from speaking out against, or replacing, our Overseer, our Intellectual Council was compromised. Actual experts and intellectuals were replaced with phonies better at faking intelligence and sucking the Overmare off. Wearing the masks of mindless Yes-Ponies, corrupt backstabbers rose to power and began to give their friends and sexual partners jobs they weren't qualified for. Critics of the current system found themselves accused of all kinds of molestation by random paid-off whores who'd say they were raped a thousand times AND let themselves get molested by Stable Security once "To make their performance more authentic" if it meant securing more food for their families.

Speaking of the Council, I wonder… What would you call the system of government we had, before it became a sham of a civilization where lower-level ponies were forced to give up on life, and could often go their whole lives without ever finding their Cutie Marks, even if they escaped the culls month after month because a sufficient number of ponies beneath them were culled before them for every month they spent alive? An all-powerful Autocrat, restrained by a council of elites, each one either a pioneer in their field or simply highly knowledgeable about their field, or a beloved and brilliant writer, or our current Stable Security Chief. Or that one painter we had on the Council at one point. He was weird. In any case, the council leaders of old were not democratically elected. The founders of the institution made their case to the Overmare of old, in front of their Vault's ponies, and they argued for it so eloquently that they convinced her to give them power over matters related to their assorted fields of expertise. In the event that two or more ponies wanted to join the council, and wanted the same "Head of X" title in their council, they would debate over who knew more and who was best suited to the role. A general consensus had to be reached among the council, when it came to accepting new members and replacing the old. Was that democracy, when the council voted to pass something after it failed to reach a general consensus among themselves? Or was it Oligarchy? Was that Aristocracy, Plutocracy, or Technocracy? Techno-Aristocracy? A Techno-Pluto-Oligarchist Council, keeping an unelected and selected Tyrannical autocrat in check. Then again, the position of Overseer was an inheritable one, so perhaps Monarch was a better option. Yes, like the Kings, Queens, Princes, and even Princesses of old. A Democratic Techno-Pluto-Oligarchist Monarch, that's something you don't see every day, and it's something I would never get to see, because the system had dissolved into a Kraterocracy, rule of the 'Strong'. Only instead of actual strength or intelligence, your cunning and your ability to stab your rivals in the back were what got you power, along with your ability to suck the Overmare's non-existent cock. Then again, Katerocracies didn't typically have undertones of Hoof-licker-ocracy.

Anyway, when we realized we were overpopulating both Vaults, we knew something had to change. And I'm not exactly convinced the best changes were made under the watchful eye of our supposedly glorious Overmare, or her successor. And the Council, at that point, was unwilling to oppose either of them.

By the way, quick note for the sake of clarification: The job of Vault Leader, the one whose job it is to watch everypony, is called an Overseer. Male ones are called Overstallions and female ones are called Overmares.

Culls were instituted. If you sucked too much at something important, or you didn't show enough talent at what your Cutie Mark made you good at, or you got caught speaking out against the rulers too often, you were culled. You know, killed.

If you were a criminal, you were killed. If the Elites couldn't think of a use for you. If you were a criminal the ruler and her little party of helpers and conspirators didn't like, you were publically executed. If you were disabled, you were killed.

Ponies were shuffled around and moved at the Overseer's whim almost weekly. If you were one of the current generation's 'Elite', or a previous generation's 'Elite', you got to live on one of the higher levels, closer to Vault 177's main door and the Overmare's office. If not, you were moved into the lower levels. Crappy rooms near things like generators went to crappy ponies, and as the years went by, lower-level ponies in sleeping bags and on bedrolls started to outnumber ponies in beds. The threat of getting killed, or worse, getting sent to a lower level of the Vault, where you would be tortured and then killed by ponies who hated the 'Elites', kept the upper-level ponies who could have stopped this fearful and in line with the Overmare's goals. After all, as she said when she justified this to herself and her followers, they and their way of life would be destroyed if they allowed the lower-class ponies, who easily outnumbered them a hundred to one, to seize power.

Any weapons you couldn't bullshit Stable Security into letting you keep, such as baseball bats or tire irons, were taken from the ponies of the lower levels, and hoarded in the upper levels. If you wanted a gun, you had to "Earn" yourself a promotion to the middle levels, where they were allowed crappy old pistols, and nothing stronger than crappy old pistols. If you wanted the 'Right' to own sniper rifles, assault rifles, and anti-tank rifles, or laser and plasma pistols, or anything like that, and you wanted the right to play around with them at the Vault's Shooting Ranges, you had to be an Elite, preferably one in Stable Security.

Vault 40, having been annexed, became empty space. Empty space that was quickly filled up with our poorest. Our jobless, and our hopeless. Their Overmare's Office found itself getting a new owner and professional perpetual voyeur: Stainless Steel, the leader of Stable Security. Away from the all-seeing eyes of our Overmare, this vault was where he found the opportunity to really indulge in his sadistic tendencies, and to speak out against him or what he did to some poor soul's daughter this week was to speak out against the Overmare who trusted him completely. I'm not sure why this arrangement was made between the two, but it wouldn't surprise me if Steel had something on the Overmare, or had threatened to organize and execute a coup and run solo unless she did as he wanted. Then again, maybe she just liked it when her ponies were hurt. It's hard to speculate on which monster is worse than the other when you barely knew anything about either one.

Something called an Expansion Program was established, when the overpopulation crisis got even worse. Tough worker ponies from the lower levels thoughtcriminals who wanted to be spared from the Culls were sent to a certain wing of the Vault's lowest level, which was emptied out for them a week ahead of time. When the penal colony ponies had gotten to their new home, the heavy steel doors to that area were permanently sealed, and the ponies began to get to work drilling through the Vault Walls, with a supply of spare metal ready to be spread through the tunnels to serve as new walls and floors. These ponies were tasked with digging deeper and deeper underground, to expand the Vault. Some ponies died in tunnel collapses, some ponies died from overexposure to soil and rock tainted with dark magic, and some ponies died of exhaustion after being forced to work almost non-stop, with few breaks, long days, and short sleep sessions. This became where the thieves, repeated minor rule-breakers, critics of the government, and other undesirables were sent, to die in the name of expanding the Vault. And whenever the Expansionists found themselves running low on members, the Overmare would invent new, stupid laws for the sake of bolstering their membership, such as 'It is illegal to wear silk-laced clothing on a Tuesday' and 'No belts are permitted to be worn on a Monday'. Or, the Overmare would simply claim she cast a future-seeing spell and knew one pony was about to turn into a criminal, and that locking him away pre-emptively was the only way to stop him from doing something stupid like putting bombs in the generator room and detonating everything our Vault needed to survive.

Through it all, the Overmare insisted that some day, the Expansion Program within the new Miner's Quarters would expand the Vault so much, we could all go back to the glory days when the place didn't feel so overcrowded and you didn't have to book your sessions with in the Vault's Leisure Activity rooms months in advance. Or years in advance, in the case of the Vault's lower-levelled rooms. Speaking of which, higher-level ponies were allowed to trump the pre-made bookings of lower-levelled ponies when it came to activity rooms like the libraries, gyms, and workshop rooms. You can guess how many violent crimes against smug time-stealing bastards this resulted in.

When our Overmare died and everypony tried to hide their desire to celebrate, her replacement promised us changes.

We should have known this meant she'd make the rich 'Elites' and their foals immune to the Culls, ruining the whole point of the system by allowing rich wastes of resources to dress themselves and their many foals as extravagantly as they desired while lower-level ponies struggled to find enough cloth to make bedrolls and sleeping bags. Speaking of cloth, I forgot to mention it, but we had a Cloth Talisman, just like our Water and Food Talismans. Infinite supplies of each, sure, but they're slowly-dispensed infinite supplies of each, and if you overtax them for even a second, you increase the likelihood that they'll break. While the ponies of many Vaults never changed out of their Vault Suits, thick and fashionable blue jumpsuits, our Vault's ponies thought we were better than that, so we put our Vault Suits in the back of our cupboards and dressed ourselves differently. The upper-level ponies dressed themselves in absurd fashions, elaborate costumes that took long periods of time to get into and out of, while the lower-level ponies dressed in tough work clothes, in the case of workers, and rags, in the case of those who weren't granted any better by upper management.

One more thing… The overpopulation was starting to get so bad that there were more workers and apprentices than there were resources to go around. Sure, our Vaults recycled a lot, but that didn't pull new supplies out of thin air. Some research was being done to try and open portals into other worlds, which we could expand into and take resources from, but that hadn't borne any fruit before the day I left the Vault, no pun intended.

Into this lit powder keg waiting to blow, I was born.

My name is Sunrise Stardust. I am a red Unicorn with bright golden eyes, and my horn is framed with the frontal part of my mane, straightly combed hair that fell forwards, streaked with horizontal zigzags of orange, gold, and red, cut into jagged ends. The upper-back part of my mane spikes up and backwards, an orange array of combed-out spines with golden centers. Running down the back of my head and neck is the last part of my mane, combed-out and straightened spines of purple hair with one gold streak. That gold streak has an orange streak running through its upper half, curving up and stopping short just before it meets the end of my hair. As for my tail, it's a long, straight, and wide curtain of purple hair with one orange streak and one wider golden streak running down its length, and it frames my ass quite nicely. As a foal, I somehow got it into my head that the fact that my tail naturally resembles Twilight Sparkle's in shape simply must mean that I'm destined for great things. I won't say I spend a while in the mirror each day making sure my mane spikes properly in the way I want it, while letting my tail fall in its natural manner, but I also won't deny that, because it's true. Twinned piercings run through the ends of my ears, two titanium sticks with a separate diamond on either end. Upon my flanks, my Cutie Mark can be seen. I got it reasonably early, and it's a sun, with wavy rays of orange light radiating from it. But it isn't just any old sun, it's a spiralling yin-yang of white-mooned purple darkness and a red sun's golden dawn, representing cycles, changes, the sun and moon, conflicting concepts and their synthesis, the skies above and all within them, and above all... Magic. Well, that's everything I can read into it when I look at it, but I'm pretty sure it mostly means magic.

I am a direct descendant of Moondancer, though to be fair, a lot of ponies from my Vault are. Unfortunately, I did not inherit an incredibly-powerful laser weapon, a mysterious and powerful magical weapon passed down through the family line for generation, or an even better spell only the 'Worthy' and 'Chosen' can cast, or a family of spells only those of my family line can cast, or even a seemingly-normal hand-me-down family heirloom of a book that's actually the key to a hidden segment of the Vault with portals to any of the hopefully-infinite worlds out there, providing infinite food, space, and resources for all. My hobbies are studying magic, studying the important sciences(And to be honest, studying some fields more than others. My overall knowledge of science probably isn't the best in the universe, all things considered), caring for my room's small planter of flowers and pretending that's gardening, writing music to channel my incredible rage constructively, playing that music on the electromagical guitar, sparring, engaging in magical duels, studying pre-war tactics, reading about pre-war history, and reading about fictional worlds that turned out better than my one. My life's ambition is to learn from the past, bring Equestria back to life, and make Equestria great again. And to become awesome, of course.

And to carry out that ambition, I made a plan.

Step one, Study harder than anypony else.

Step two, Make some friends in high and low places.

Step three, Become a rockstar.

Step four, Improvise and adapt as necessary until I've turned my gang of loudmouthed juvenile delinquents, its secret supporters, its even more secret rule-abiding members and sleeper agents, my adoring fanbase, and everypony who ideologically agrees with me into the greatest army the Equestrian Wasteland has ever seen.

Step five, Reconquer Baltimare, the key to bringing an industrial revolution and civilization to a blasted hellscape where these things lie as forgotten as the names of the pony skeletons that still litter the ground in some cities.

Step six, Avenge Equestria.

Step seven, Improvise and adapt as necessary until Equestria is great again.

Quite a good plan, if I do say so myself. Sure, I dreamed it up when I was a young foal and wrote it in an imaginary book with an imaginary quill in my own mind's imaginary bookcase, but if I wasn't going to dedicate my life to that foalhood dream, what else was I going to dedicate my life to? What else could I do in such an environment, besides keeping my head down, trying not to get killed by bad policies out-of-touch rulers enforced with the aid of corrupt 'Law' enforcement, hoping that I survived long enough to have foals, and hoping that my foals did the same as I did before our population passed the point where our supplies could sustain us all, or even any of us at all?

Long nights spent studying in the Library until I fell asleep, missed parties and lost friendships, pretending to get glowing hornboners in class when I was actually performing magical control exercises and pretending to get them so often that ponies eventually stopped taking so notice… almost constantly playing illegally-shared and downloaded audiobooks and playing them so often, I must have heard the voice of narrators more than my own voice and the voices of my parents… talking to troubled and good-natured ponies the system was failing and pushing into a short-lived life of delinquency and eventual servitude as an Expansionist, and getting those troubled ponies to join my gang of 'Badasses' that didn't really do much of anything except posing, posturing, protecting the weak kids from bullies, and yelling "Dark Stars rule!" now and then… skipping out on school to spend more time in the library and the firing range, where I threw spells around until I had fully mastered them and the underlying mechanics of magic… I eventually started skiving off school to dedicate my days to magic and convincing the teacher to let me into the Night Schools with the poorer kids… and eventually, it was time for me to start sucking up to the 'Elites' and pretending that my life's ambition was to leave my 'Silly and juvenile' gang-leader ways behind and become one of them, metaphorically sucking them off by pretending their decadent, wasteful, detrimental lifestyles could ever be anything a foal like me could ever consider admirable…

It was hard.

For one thing, my family was less than useless. They weren't just useless, they were an active detriment to my goals, and the life I would lead if I gave up on them. My life actually would have been easier if they'd both died during childbirth, or gotten Cancer and died at some point in my youth. I'd like to tell you they were just old-fashioned closed-minded idiots who hated the upper-level ponies and my ambition to become one as part of my Stable Saviour Plan. I'd like to tell you they had good intentions, but were out-of-touch idiots who thought trying to break my spirit and resign myself to a life spent with them would make me happier when my dreams inevitably – according to them – failed and I had to spend my life with them anyway. I'd like to say they had good intentions, or some sort of redeeming feature. Maybe even more than one redeeming feature to share between them. The truth is that they were much worse.

They were low-class ponies, like myself. And jobless, like I was during my younger years. Though unlike myself, they were both jobless for pretty much their entire lives, having both tried working once each in their lives and crumbled under the stress, giving up for good. And unlike myself, instead of hungering for a meaning in life, they hungered for meaningless things they considered meaningful. Most of all, they hungered for social status. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they were acting. Playing the part of poor, precious, put-upon parents who tried The Hardest(TM) for their foals and do The Most(Patent Pending) out of anypony on their level, acting like appearance-obsessed upper-classers in a low-class level that should have been a place free of such pretentiousness and two-faced dishonesty. They would regularly emphasize and exaggerate how difficult commonly-done and simple little things like getting laid without their respective spouse finding out, cooking rationed food ingredients into acceptable meals, and taking their foals to school were. Even though, on many days, they didn't bother with those things. They would also whine to friends they secretly loathed – and who, of course, secretly loathed them in turn – about how hard it was to be a parent of a 'Robot' like me, and they had similarly awful nicknames for the rest of my siblings, let me tell you. To try and earn some precious sympathy points, they would lie about things I did, things my siblings did, and so on. Suddenly, I went from a quiet and mature foal to a horrifying and violent brute who'd terrorize my parents behind locked doors, and my habit for leaving the classroom and hitting the Technological Sector's Digital Book Machines for some fresh downloads became a habit of running into the lower levels and exchanging sexual favours for drugs. Yes, really. That isn't hyperbole, they truly were that dishonest, that manipulative, that obsessed with shallow appearances, and that willing to throw away the reputation of their own foals for some worthless, meaningless status. I got into more than a few fights in the hallways over whatever bullshit rumour my parents had been spreading about me today. Still, I doubt anypony above the age of twenty was really fooled by their whining about how hard their lives were, and how much harder I supposedly made it by being a smart foal they hated. Most likely, as the ponies of their level did what little parenting my birth parents did every day and then some, they didn't think of these things as particularly hard, only that they were particularly hard for my birth parents. It's almost funny. They thought they were so much smarter than those around those they secretly detested with a hatred they also prided themselves on for some reason, but they were too stupid to notice that everypony else secretly detested them far more.

In their heads, my parents were pitiable and perfect paragons of virtue who'd been dealt a miserable lot in life, and anypony who got in the way of that fantasy of theirs was a monster out to make them feel even worse than they already did. Of course, they were the monsters, terrified of what might happen if anypony found out that their absurd 'Sad pathetic ponies' act was a lie. To try and add some credibility to the lies they'd tell, they would sabotage me and my work, try to keep me up all night to sabotage my performance in school(I sometimes suspect they are the cause of my little 'Sleeping problem'), make up bullshit reasons for me to be denied the right to leave the house and eat dinner that day, removing the burden on them to cook it... And all the while, they would lie to my face about what they were and what they were doing. They even tried to get sympathy points from me, the one they were hurting most of all! It really fucked with my head when I was a foal, but after many years of self-care, I'd mostly gotten over it. Mostly.

On some miserable nights spent trying to stay awake and pay attention in class with my little 'Time problem' screwing me over(I have problems with falling asleep when I want to, and I have a habit of uncontrollably falling asleep at inopportune times. And in terms of my physical and mental capabilities, I do a lot better during the day and a lot worse during the night. Nopony's sure why that last part is a thing that exists and happens to me, not even our Vault's resident medical experts. Better for it to screw me over during unimportant lessons trying to teach me stuff I already know than during magical training, where a random collapse could seriously injure or even kill me, right?), the temptation to give up manifested as the temptation to give up on my dreams and just coast like all the other markless and lifeless low-level foals had done so long ago, all the miserable bodies waiting for death who'd lost faith in the world, their ability to ever get a Cutie Mark and find anything that made their lives worth living, the Vault's social system, and Ponykind's ability to ever change that system without war, bloodshed, purges, and worse.

On some miserable nights spent exhaustedly striking the ground in frustration after having failed to master a spell or magical trick too many times in a row, and worse ones spent in the hospital after fucking up high-level spells so badly I almost died, while my beloved parents bitched at me about what a disappointment and embarrassment they claimed I was for them when I hurt myself in this way, the temptation to give up manifested as the temptation to steal somepony's gun and shoot myself in the head.

Not any thoughts a foal should probably have, I know. Thoughts about killing my own parents - and then myself - probably aren't thoughts a foal should have, either. And I suppose the same went for the temptation to let myself go stir-crazy, or develop 'A Stable Mind' as some cutesy piece of shit had decided to name it, and start killing Stable Security ponies until I got killed.

Getting some illegal home-brewed alcohol from the lower floors and smuggling it into the rooms of my parents, and then calling Stable Security to get them caught with it, was one of the best decisions I ever made. What a way to celebrate my tenth birthday! They weren't killed or anything – Unfortunately – But myself and my siblings (I'm going to be honest with you, I often forget that I ever even had any of those mind-fucked parent-loving little bastards for siblings in the first place) were scattered to the four winds, so that we could be placed with better families. Well, I was placed with an elderly piece of shit, who at least had the good sense to trade me to some other family. Though to be traded away in return for some pre-war trading cards, of all things! What an insult. In any case, I found myself placed with two bright young things, Pheonix Flame and Volcanic Flare, two kind-hearted ponies with a loving family I made sure to send regular packages of supplies back to, later on in my life, when I'd moved on up in the world.

Oh, right, I forgot to mention this, but alcohol is supposed to be illegal in my Vault. Plenty of middle-class ponies drink it anyway, plenty of lower-class ponies smuggle it down to even lower classes and trade it away for assorted goods and services, and plenty of higher-class ponies are "Professional Advice-Givers" that are actually magically-gifted crafters of premium-quality alcohol that finds itself all over the Vault soon enough. How do ponies with alcohol bottles for Cutie Marks keep that sham up? Stable Security only objects to the lower classes brewing alcohol, because they're shit at it, due to having to make do with crappy and improvised nonmagical equipment. The upper classes… Well, if they send regular gifts of "Old, dusty, hand-me-down" bottles of premium alcohol to Stable Security, they'd get the brutes to look the other way.

It was also kind of funny how, once my parents were cast down into the Vault's lower levels and known through my Vault's level and their new one as alcohol-drinkers, they became the detested ones, while myself and my siblings became the poor, precious, pitied ponies who everypony needed to be seen being hugged. Stories abounded of my parents being vicious drunken bastards who beat me and my siblings for fun and molested all three of my sisters together. The ponies of this Vault's level were fickle idiots, of course, because that culture tended to develop in the lower levels. Something about the place turned supposed adult ponies into shallow, gossipy hens, constantly trying to socially assassinate each other and throw each other under the tank treads so everypony would be too distracted by trying to be seen hating the demon of the week to notice any hen's own dirty laundry.

I'd be lying if I said that my parents were the only things holding me back, and that I would magically, instantly become amazing and a bastion of absolute physical and mental stability and reliability once my 'Emotional Training Weights' were removed.

I wish it worked that way. Fuck, I wish it worked that way. I wish I got more out of it than an understanding that sometimes, you have to lie to save your own ass.

I wish my reflexes to dodge this thrown metal dinner plate and duck under that swing made me an invincible god when it came to martial arts. I wish my finely-honed ability to read ponies was always reliable, and would never give me false positives regarding the trustworthiness of others and the likelihood that I was being lied to. I wish I didn't have to expend serious effort to keep it together when things go off the rails. And I wish I was emotionally ready to bear my heart and soul to another pony and trust that pony unconditionally, without having to fake a smile and pretend there's nothing more to me than the good I've done, my skills and accomplishments, and the good I want to do with my life.

I wish my foalhood left me better-adjusted than the average pony, and I wish it didn't make me feel like a wounded actor pretending he's fine so the show can go on as if everything's fine. I got better at hiding my pain quickly. Learning to handle my pain took longer. With a lot of effort, meditation, and thinking about my life, I think I've gotten myself to… ninety six percent, perhaps? I'm not really sure how to describe it. I don't get flashbacks any more, and I don't randomly get pissed off at random shit out of the blue either. It feels like there's a weight inside that I carry with me, and I've gotten better at carrying it over time. And after many years of dealing with it, I don't notice it much. I'd like to say that I don't notice it at all, but I still do. It's still there, even now.

Furthermore, that wasn't the only thing holding me back. I'm going to be honest with you, I am a naturally lazy pony. I don't know if this is something I developed over time or if it was always with me from the start, but I love sitting around and doing nothing. Even curling up with a good book and slowly reading it for fun, instead of speed-reading it for the information, is something I like to do when I feel really lazy. And while I love challenges, and fights, and fucking, and other things that get my heart pumping, I've always felt adventure, true adventure, was something best experienced on the safe side of an old page marked with ink. I truly, honestly love being lazy, even though I don't like how disgusted I feel with myself after doing it. Developing that sense of disgust at laziness was what got me to stop lazing around every so often and "Woe is me!"-ing around the place. Despite everything I had already accomplished, and everything I wanted to accomplish, there were many days when I just wanted to give up. My parents certainly didn't help, with how they tried to sabotage my youngest years, or how they emotionally sabotaged me for the rest of my life.

It was pain. It was hell.

And through it all, I had one friend I could truly count on: Books.

Books didn't care who you were. Books didn't care where you read them, or what time you read them at. If you had some free time, you could duck into a nearby bathroom and pull a book out of your saddlebag, or read some downloaded digital copies of books on your Pip-Buck. Books wouldn't get mad at you for opening them up at six in the morning, before the rest of your family had woken up, and reading them in silence. Books didn't mind if you had to read the same piece of information multiple times and check out what other books had said about the same subjects before you truly understood what the books wanted you to know. Books didn't mind if you stopped listening to them halfway through a sentence, due to having something else to deal with forced upon you, and you didn't get a chance to hear that book's voice again until you turned on your Pip-Boy in some bathroom stall. And if a book turned out to be garbage, full of misinformation and lies, you could throw it away and find better ones, without having to worry about those books coming to resent you, or try and get revenge upon you. Books didn't have personas to keep up, masks to hide behind, or fears of getting put down. The way I saw it, and the way I still see it… Books are like wishes made not on shooting stars, but on ink and parchment by their writers, and they would tell you what they wanted to tell you, no matter what.

Sure, physical copies of books were luxuries, ordered in advance and borrowed from the Library more for status than anything. Even books from the Reference Section (That bit of the Library with books you aren't allowed to take outside of the Library) could be rented for the right under-the-table transaction. I got my books from this place in the Technological Sector, the Tech Sec, where there was this open-to-the-public terminal, filled with digital copies of books. Fiction and nonfiction, modern and outdated… You could even submit new digital files you'd written yourself (With the aid of an old-fashioned Pip-Buck Keyboard you had to plug in using a normally-covered slot in the side, or with the aid of the Pip-Buck 7000's illusionary keyboard display) to the Book Horses, the owners of this unnamed book terminal. If your digital book was good, it would be published on that terminal, for all to copy.

And due to the rules against low-level ponies going too high above their level without a pre-approved permit, and the cultural stigma against going too far below your level, and the considerable health risk in going too far below your level and getting jumped by a poor pony with nothing to lose but the tire iron in his mouth, many ponies on assorted medium and low levels had downloaded large quantities of books onto their Pip-Buck, to then redistribute at will, either for free or in return for goods and services. Remember this, it'll be important later on.

Anyway, that was my foalhood. First, I was the detested foal of two open frauds, who accidentally made ponies think to themselves, "If these idiots can't stand him, he must be REALLY bad!". My only reliable friends were books. And then, when the fakes had changed their tune on me, I made two new friends, though they were often too busy with their studies to talk to me. And that was refreshing, to live with a family who cared about their studies. In any case, books were still my oldest and most reliable friends. It was lonely. Crushingly lonely, and in a few ways, having two almost-friends live with you made it feel… Worse? The idea of having family members I cared about was so alien to me, I still wasn't sure if I liked it or not by the time I got my Cutie Mark.

My Cutie Mark…

MY one. My Cutie Mark, the best one.

I made up for the pain that was my foalhood in my teenage years, when I blossomed like a fucking sunflower. Or… Bloomed, I suppose. Either way, when I got that mark, everypony knew it: I was rising in rank, and I was headed for the top.

Making sure to stay reasonably fit, but not too fit, while dedicating my whole foalhood to magic without dedicating too much time, emotion, or favour to any particular aspect of magic above any other aspects finally paid off when I got myself a Cutie Mark in Magic, the best possible Cutie Mark for a great hero to have! I don't know if I really cheated fate out of a great Cutie Mark or if I only found myself developing an affinity for magic and a desire to get a Cutie Mark in Magic because I was destined to get one anyway, but either way, hooray for me, I finally got some confirmation that my dreams could be possible. And finally, I could branch out, make friends, cheer ponies up, learn the sciences and the arts, take up what passed for 'Gardening' around here, learn to sing, learn to play the guitar, learn to make a speech, and learn to lead an army without having to worry about getting a Cutie Mark that doomed me to a life spent with a great talent for one of those things and no talent in anything else.

I was a genius, according to everypony else. They called me Gifted. I claimed I found it easy, when that would endear me to 'Elites' with a serious hard-on for natural talent, and I said that I'm good at this and that but it's my hard work that got me where I was today when I was around 'Elites' who wanted to believe they were also in the lap of luxury thanks to hard work and natural, inherent virtue.

I was able to form a Study Group, where ponies from multiple Levels m