Fallout Equestria

Chapter 13.

Home.

"Relinquish your rights to the contents of the vault, and she's all yours," Gawd explained as she pointed a wing at Junction R-7. "Do you accept?"

A vault full of memories torn from the minds of ponies two hundred years dead... or a place to call my home.

"Won't you need it?" I asked cautiously. "For defense?"

"Now that I'm running the show, I'll be moving into Shattered Hoof proper. We don't have the numbers to effectively spread between all the outposts anymore. We have t' consolidate and build up new defenses. If we're lucky, Red Eye's slavers will scurry back t' their dens and lick their wounds. I don't trust in luck." Gawd gave a hard smile. "I prefer t' count on people being greedy. Tends t' work much better."

I nodded slowly. "And the ponies here, they won't loot it while I'm away?"

Gawd smirked. I was getting good at asking what she seemed to consider the right questions. "Not if I tell them not t', they won't." With an uncharacteristic touch of warmth, she added, "Everyone acknowledges what you did for them back there. Those that don't feel like they owe you at least have the good sense not t' draw the ire of the local dragon slayer."

I looked at the disabled train and scrap metal shacks, seeing it in an entirely new light. This could be my home. Our home, if Calamity and Velvet Remedy were willing. A place to rest. For Calamity to hang his hat. (Figuratively, at least, considering he even slept with it on, just like he slept in the underbarding for that battle saddle.)

I trotted around it, drinking it in.

There was a water pump out back. Grills for cooking. A small water purifier in what had been Gawd's private quarters. As well as the passenger car, the train included several lockable cattle cars and two boxcars -- we could each have our own space, plenty of room for storage. A generator in one of the shacks kept the lights on at night and the refrigerator in the back boxcar running.

I glanced at the guard platform over what had been Gawd's office. Calamity waved his bandaged wing back at me. He was almost finished mounting the tri-barreled plasma cannon in its position. I wondered... Calamity was the only one of the three of us who had any skill shooting that monster manually, but would it be possible for me to rig it up like an automated turret? Thinking of the sky-camouflaged convoy, I knew a perfect place to get the parts.

True, the place was rusted, filthy, full of moldy hay -- but most of that could be set to rights with a lot of hard work and a little TLC. The horrible reek from the station house, its bathroom overflowing with manure, was another matter entirely. I glanced over to it, gagging slightly. That would be an arduous and entirely unpleasant task to fix.

Velvet Remedy caught my expression and sing-songed, "Don't think of it as years of piled-up ponypies, Littlepip. Think of it as free fertilizer. We could start a garden."

We! The word filled me with more warmth and joy than direct sunlight possibly could.

My home in the Equestrian Wasteland would be the former house of Gawd. Including her office.

Any hesitation (or concern about why Gawd suddenly wanted a vault full of memory orbs), was washed away by that wonderful "we".

"I'll take it!"

*** *** ***

"Ah don't get it," Calamity muttered. "She's helpin' raiders now?"

Together, Calamity and I walked through the rock yard of Shattered Hoof slightly behind Gawd. Velvet Remedy was elsewhere, insisting that she do what she could to mend the injured, despite having completely run out of medical supplies (both our own and those of Shattered Hoof) the second morning after the battle. And even though it was entirely possible that the vile monsters who killed Silver Bell's parents were amongst the wounded rather than the dead.