/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

>>297844

>Also in the news: got another report of hellhounds attacking travelers in the wasteland between Manehattan and Fillydelphia. Honestly, ponies, if you have to travel that way, make sure you have a heavily armed escort.
Hurr durr that's where we're going, I wonder if that's going to be relevant?

Anyway, eventually the DJ plays a Sweetie Belle song, and I guess that was the last voice they needed. The author still doesn't bother to tell us who the other two voices are, nor does he explain the logic LP used to figure out which voices were needed. He does, however, provide the text of the recordings, so I guess anyone who was astute enough could go back, find those specific lines of text earlier in the book, and look to see who they were attributed to.

>“The override code for opening the door to Stable Two is... CMC3BFF.”
This was apparently spoken by Applebloom.

>“Hello! My name is Scootaloo. You probably know me (since I am pretty famous) for my awesome performances at events like last year’s GALLoPS, or maybe just as the founder of Red Racer…”
This one at the very least contains a name.

>I turned to find Velvet Remedy walking past me to face the door. The gorgeous mare had donned her beautiful dress and groomed her mane. I shot a look to Calamity, who merely shrugged. “um… Velvet?” The dress hid most of her bandages.
What? So...apparently Velvet had time to put on her fancy dress at some point and clean herself up a bit. I'll ignore the question of how or when, because the most pertinent question is why?

>“We’re meeting the ponies of another Stable for the first time. We want to put our best hoof forward,” she said aristocratically. “Especially if they’ve never had outside visitors before. We want to look like diplomats,” her eye moved to look at me without turning her head. “If you two went in first, we’d look like invaders.”
*sigh*
*rubs temples*
*chugs half a bottle of tequila*
*sighs and rubs temples again*
The group is entering an unknown stable. The last stable they entered was filled with radioactive cats. Granted, Velvet wasn't along for that trip, but we can assume she's probably heard the story at some point during their travels. Why would she assume that there would be anyone in here they could reason with? In fact, why even assume it would be inhabited? Again, the last stable they visited had been empty and abandoned for what seemed like decades. In fact, here is what we read about this stable just a few short paragraphs ago:

>“Well, this was a bust,” he proclaimed. It looked like Stable Twenty-Nine had never opened. And without an override password, it was unlikely that we would be getting in.
>It looked like Stable Twenty-Nine had never opened.
>never opened.
This strongly implies that the stable they are entering was built, but never occupied. Thus, my assumption has been that they are probably about to enter an empty stable that has either been hermetically sealed for 200 years, or else has been broken into and occupied by monsters or raiders as was the case with the last one. Either way, they would be entering a potentially dangerous situation. Frankly, the idea that this stable would be occupied in the same way that the one LP came from was occupied had never even crossed my mind, though in retrospect I suppose it's logical. Actually, if the party was assuming that the stable is a friendly place, it might explain this rather bat-shit-crazy idea of diving headfirst into a dungeon when they all have like 2 HP each god damn it now he's got me thinking like a vidya game sperg.

Anyway, Velvet at some point got all dolled up to introduce herself to what is probably an abandoned cavern filled with rapacious raiders, and nonchalantly strolls inside as soon as the door opens.

> Calamity limped up to me as I watched her disappear inside. “She’s really somethin’, ain’t she.”
>“Yes…” I said, feeling a little dumbstruck. I glanced at Calamity, who was staring through the door at Velvet. “…she…” I did a double-take. Calamity wasn’t looking at Velvet Remedy, he was looking at her. Something broke in my brain. “…no!”
And in other news, the last horse has finally crossed the finish line. I've always wanted to use that expression literally :^)

Anyway, there is a page break here. When the next scene starts, Littlepoop is silently fuming to herself over only just now realizing that Calamity wants to stick his hoo hoo dilly into Velvet's cha cha. Meanwhile, they just forced open the door to this hermetically sealed stable which could contain raiders, friendlies, monsters, or anything in between, but this seems to be the furthest thing from her mind.

This author has a really weird approach to developing his various subplots. This story mostly follows a pattern, where Littlepoop will chug along from adventure to adventure, mostly fixating on whatever external goal she has at that moment or whatever crap she's looting, and then she will just randomly blurt out something about Mint-als (which I guess she is supposed to be addicted to, even though she rarely if ever thinks about them), or Velvet (with whom she claims to be in love, even though she never seems to behave that way towards her in any of their interactions). It feels even weirder when he drops these bombs at inappropriate times, case in point. Obviously, the love triangle between these characters was going to reach this point eventually, but is now really the right moment? Literally at the precise second when the door to an unknown and potentially hostile location swings open, Littlepoop is getting paranoid about Velvet and Calamity getting together? I mean, the love triangle isn't a bad idea, and there's plenty the author can do with it, but there's a time to focus on side-plots and a time to focus on what's happening in the here and now. Even putting this in there a few seconds before the door opened would have been fine.

>>298014

>I took the mental image of Calamity successfully wooing Velvet Remedy when I could not and shoved it into a deep dark hole.
At this point, I think the author should consider doing something similar with this entire text. Also, it's worth noting that she hasn't actually attempted to woo Velvet Remedy yet; she's basically giving up without even putting in a marginal effort.

Anyway, LP sets her feelings aside and turns her attention to their immediate situation. The stable actually appears to be something like what I was originally envisioning, which is well-preserved but empty and abandoned. Unsurprisingly, there is a skeleton hanging in front of the door.

>This was an ominous start.
Again, I really don't see why they would have been expecting anything different. Every other place they've explored has been full of skeletons, ffs, even the place that actually had ponies living in it had a damn cabinet full of them.

>My Eyes-Forward Sparkle was clear of any red. For that matter, it was completely clear of anything other than my two companions. There was no life in this Stable. At least, not within the range of my PipBuck’s spell. The Stable was utterly silent, save for the ever-present high-pitched hum of the lights and the gentle rumble of the generators.
And again, it seems like they should have been more or less expecting this. The entrance to the stable was located underneath an abandoned train car in a bombed-out city, the door had never been opened, and there have been no indications of life or civilization anywhere in the area. Add to that the fact that nearly every other place they visit is either abandoned or full of enemies. What exactly did they expect to find down here?

Anyway, they've got two different options for which way they can go: maintenance, or atrium. Maintenance would take them to the PipBuck stall, where they would be most likely to find the key thingy they are looking for, but they also are in dire need of medical supplies, which they could find by going the other way. So, they head for the atrium first.

>Stepping in, my eyes immediately fell on the skeletons of at least three dozen other ponies.
At this point, they should be surprised when they enter a location and don't find three dozen skeletons.

>I had to use telekinesis to create a path through the bones of the ponies “lucky enough” to have made it into a Stable before the megaspell destroyed Manehattan. I felt anger biting at the back of my head. I reminded myself it wasn’t my Stable.
What exactly is she angry about here? What is the implication? She doesn't know how any of these ponies died, or why. There seems to be an implication that some sort of tremendous injustice occurred in this place, and that it somehow feeds into whatever LP's hang up about stables in general is, which actually hasn't been very well-explained either. Velvet also seems to disapprove of them, though that seems to be tied to her whole "I don't want to be le caged" thing.

Overall, the story seems to be leading us towards some idea that the stables were somehow insidious places that exploited or killed the ponies they purported to help. However, we haven't seen any direct evidence of this yet. LP's stable seemed like a nice enough place to live, at least as far as this setting goes, and the only other stable they've been to was the abandoned one filled with monster cats. However, the cats were the result of a freak accident that can't really be blamed on anyone, and apart from all that weird stuff about gender roles it seemed like it had been a relatively normal place as well.

>“Do you think they…?” Velvet’s voice trailed off. She was looking behind us, just above the door we had come through. Two automated security turrets were mounted on the wall. They had power, but didn’t seem to be tracking us. My E.F.S. claimed they were not a threat. The room suggested that had not always been the case.
Whatever Velvet is implying here is not clear, and it's never explained. Maybe the turrets shot them? Idk.

>Behind me, I heard Calamity whispering to Velvet, “She’s had bad reactions to a Stable before.” What, was I that obvious? “We better keep an eye on her.”
Again, I'm having a hard time figuring out what exactly LP's deal here is supposed to be. The last time around, the issue was that she was exploring an abandoned stable filled with dead ponies and monsters, and it bothered her to see a place that so closely resembled her home in such a state. Okay, I can understand that. So is the same thing happening again here? You'd think she'd be pretty used to skeletons and carnage and shit by now, and the simple coincidence of the building resembling the place she used to live shouldn't really bother her this much. What exactly is up her ass?

Part of it seems to be what she noticed about Velvet and Calamity earlier. Also, I'm assuming she is still dealing with the comedown from the crack mints. At this point, she suggests they split up:

>Velvet, why don’t you raid the clinic.” It was safe. I could see into the clinic through the Atrium window. Calamity and I will head down to maintenance.”
The author is missing a quotation mark at "Calamity and I." Also, if she's jealous, she ought to suggest that she and Velvet team up and Calamity fuck off. Sending the pony she supposedly loves off by herself to deal with a potentially dangerous situation while she hangs out with her romantic rival doesn't make a ton of sense.

Anyway, Velvet objects to this, saying that she needs to examine Calamity's bone as soon as possible :^). Littlepoop gets pissy, but realizes that she can't really vocalize why she's pissy without giving her feelings for Velvet away, so she says "fine" and goes off to the PipBuck repair station to find the whatever-key they came down here for. There is a pretty cringe-worthy dialogue exchange, in which Calamity and Velvet pretend they don't actually like each other, and then the scene ends with a page break.

>>298014

>I spent the rest of the trip down through Stable Maintenance reminding myself that it actually was a good thing that my friends got along, that it was stupid to be jealous when I’d had no real chance to begin with, and that if I wanted to keep those friends, I’d best bury these feelings in that same dark hole.
This is actually a pretty reasonable reaction, and is in line with how LP ought to be feeling right about now. However, I'd actually like to back up a little and examine the cringe-worthy dialog exchange between Calamity and Velvet that I mentioned above.

From the way she's behaving, Calamity and Velvet can clearly see that Littlepoop has some sand in her vagina, and they ask her what the fuck. She responds thusly:

>I waved a hoof. “Oh yes. I’m just… feeling a little drained. Blood loss, you know.” I put on a good smile. She looked like she was trying to be convinced. “Okay, I’m a bit surprised. But I’m happy. It’s a good thing that my two friends like each other.”
It doesn't feel like an appropriate time for her to be this blunt about what she sees between them. Velvet and Calamity clearly have feelings for each other, but neither of them seem to have openly declared it or even directly acknowledged it to themselves. For her part, Littlepoop has not made her feelings about Velvet known at all; in fact, I don't think either of them would even realize that she likes girls from her behavior thus far. Blurting it out like this not only gives her own feelings away, it calls direct attention to what's obviously developing between Velvet and Calamity, which is only going to hasten things along by making the two of them realize it and face it. Not even Littlepoop could possibly be that dumb.

If the author wanted to, he could take this little burst of jealousy from Littlepoop and mine a lot of comedy from it being misinterpreted. Since, again, Littlepoop hasn't declared any affection for Velvet and hasn't really made it apparent that she's into munching pony box, the natural assumption here would be that she is jealous because she likes Calamity, not Velvet. This misunderstanding could develop into a pretty hilarious side plot. Velvet, who obviously likes Calamity but doesn't appear to realize it yet, would think that LP likes him and might try to play matchmaker between them or something, which is obviously not what LP wants. Calamity seems to openly desire Velvet at this point, but hasn't really noticed Littlepoop. If he suddenly had reason to think LP was into him, it might change this; he'd start to notice LP more, and would probably be flattered at the thought of having his two female companions fighting over him. The whole thing could turn into an absolute mess, which would be perfect; the more convoluted you make this sort of thing, the more entertaining it tends to get.

Anyway, the next bit is where it starts to go off the rails somewhat:

> Calamity coughed. “Wait, what?” He nickered, “She’s a self-righteous, self-idolizin’ elitist who’d rather fix up our enemies than shoot ‘em.”
This isn't really an accurate characterization of Velvet, and Calamity has never said or indicated that he feels this way about her before. In the rare instances where she actually takes a moral stand on something she can be a little self-righteous, but this is actually far from being her worst quality.
>self-idolizing
She's never shown signs of having an unreasonably high opinion of herself or her talents.
>elitist
She certainly has never indicated she considers some ponies to be socially beneath her.

Now, here is what she has to say about Calamity:

>Velvet Remedy shot him a scowl. “And he’s an impulsive ruffian who thinks he can fix the wasteland by drowning it in blood.”
This is completely inaccurate, at least from what we've seen. To be fair, the author has given Calamity almost no distinct personality at all, and we don't know much about his past beyond that he's a "Dashite" (whatever the hell that is). So, nearly any characterization of him would feel inaccurate.
>impulsive
If you asked me to say the first word that popped into my head when I think of this character, "impulsive" wouldn't be it. He actually seems fairly level-headed for the most part.
>fix the wasteland by drowning it in blood
Hoo boy, if irony were strawberries, kkat would be chugging a lot of strawberry-flavored cum right now. This statement doesn't apply to Calamity at all, but it's a highly accurate characterization of Littlepoop. Calamity really hasn't explained why he does any of what he does. He doesn't seem to have any sort of overarching goals or objectives in life, he hasn't expressed any strong beliefs or principles one way or the other; he's mostly just been a presence in this story without really making any serious contributions to it. As I've often commented, it's a little perplexing why he even chose to tag along with LP in the first place. She's the one with the holy-roller mission to purge the Wasteland of all its icky badness, and who doesn't care who or whom :^) she has to slaughter in order to accomplish this. Calamity's use of violence seems to be mostly practical; he kills when he needs to, but he isn't a sadist about it. He strikes me as a pretty typical resident of the Wasteland, really; he lives day to day, mostly focuses on his own survival, and doesn't really concern himself with big-picture goals or missions.

Anyway, you'll recall from the tangent I went off on earlier about RomComs that this kind of odd-couple chemistry is a staple in romance stories. Two characters who clearly like each other will often behave as if they don't, and will often fight or be adversaries in the early part of the story. This is clearly what the author is trying to do here, but unfortunately it doesn't work, as these characters have not had anything resembling that sort of chemistry up until this point. To my memory they've never had an argument or butted heads on anything, actually.

>>298005

I dont think it would be entirely reasonable to suggest that Somber picked one the characters weapons that he only obtains like after the length of kkats foe and a significant amount of charachter development.

P-21 out the gate is so fucking assmad about stable99's... err society he's like a school shooter, and it scares him so its a big step for him to use the grenade rifle

>>297970
>quarter-jew nigel literal tism prisms.
What the actual fuck are you talking about.

>>296515
>I never finished PH but I heard it ends in a literal multi-phase videogame boss battle where Blackjack the canonical child rapist fights a big evil blob monster that's responsible for everything that ever went wrong

Isnt Blackjack canonically like 16 or something? Also that isnt where it ends and ames isnt responsibile for everything that ever went wrong, and if i remember correctly his boss killed him.

>>298070
That guy's a tsundere with a crush on me, but he just can't spit it out or realize I'm not interested in him. I'm joking, I don't actually know what his problem with me is. But if you ignore him he'll go away for a while until he feels like yelling something like this again. He doesn't call me a faggot because there's something about me he thinks I should change. He calls me a jew because he thinks if he says it enough times, others will assume it's true and join in. I was born in the UK and I'm so white I get sunburns during cloudy winter days, but if we were on a lefty site right now he'd call me a nazi instead.

>>298014
> Calamity limped up to me as I watched her disappear inside. “She’s really somethin’, ain’t she.”
>“Yes…” I said, feeling a little dumbstruck. I glanced at Calamity, who was staring through the door at Velvet. “…she…” I did a double-take. Calamity wasn’t looking at Velvet Remedy, he was looking at her. Something broke in my brain. “…no!”
Something definitely broke in Kkat's brain.
>Calamity wasn’t looking at Velvet Remedy, he was looking at her
...Her what? Her ass? Her hooves? He is Calamity and She is Velvet Remedy. How can Calamity not look at Velvet while he instead looks at her?
This has to be a typo.
Perhaps he meant to write "He was looking at her..." and then trail off?
Still fucking faggoted. This fic went through 22 proof-readers or something, right? People can buy this online and order print runs. It wouldn't surprise me if someone out there bought this at a charity store after it was given away.

>#notmystable
Littlepip and Kkat are such faggots.
He insufficiently explained her dislike of fucked vaults- I mean "Stables" and made it an insufficiently big thing.
Littlepip grew up in an underground vault made by the same company that made numerous other vaults. When she goes through an abandoned and destroyed Vault, it should be pure suffering for her. The memories should leap out and bite at her psyche like sharks made of lava lurking beneath the surface of lava. She turns down a familiar hallway, sees some familiar doors, and has to stop and tell herself she isn't back home and the third door on her left does not lead to the bedroom of the only filly who ever invited her to a slumber party and only once. It's like a funhouse-mirror version of the home she grew up in, the underground complex that was all she ever knew until she started this stupid quest. It's like a hellish mockery of the familiar ever-clean and boringly sterile environment of her home.
It's so painfully similar to her home that if she closes her eyes and ignores the smell it almost feels like nothing's changed at all. Dust and dirt and scars and blood and skeletons should bother her more than they do. She doesn't know how her home is doing and the sight of just one vault that easily fell into disrepair and became a monster-infested deathtrap should leave her terrified that her vault might suffer the same fate. Every second, she should desperately try to tell herself "This isn't my home, my home's fine". Any differences from her "hometown" of a vault just like this one should leap out at her and stretch her suspension of disbelief. And LP's memories of this place aren't entirely happy like ex-celebrity Velvet's were.
LP acts like an amateur roleplayer whose character grew up in a normal vault. So when she encounters a fucked vault, she comments on it once or twice since Kkat thinks that's something this character should do. But realistically this should be a fucking massive deal for her every time she comes to one of these shitholes.
It's like if you came from a town and left it long ago, only to return a while later to see it's been taken over by monsters and coated in filth and decay. Except you know there are countless other towns out there that started eerily similar to yours and they've probably all gone to shit.
The sight of her first destroyed Stable full of monsters should shake her greatly and make her count her blessings that her Stable didn't suffer from a random chimp event or random mutant cat infestation or have some random goofily-written men-in-charge gimmick. She didn't react enough to this when she was a newfag, so all the time spent focusing on it now makes her look weird.
The sight of her second destroyed Stable should hurt her hope and make her fear that all Stables out there are fucked in some way. Her name, "The Stable Dweller", should also stick out to her and make her think "Oh fuck, being from a Stable is considered noteworthy enough to be your epithet in this world. Were all Stables fucked, or are they just peacefully existing underground? I may never know but I wish I knew!"
Instead of callously clearing a path through skeletons coating the floors like dirty laundry coats the bedroom of a messy faggot, the sight of areas where ponies gathered for no reason before dying together for no reason should make her cry. At least fucking once. And then grow tougher skin over time so wasteland shit EVENTUALLY stops bothering her as much as it should bother a realistically-written civilian newfag to the post-apocalyptic lifestyle. Kkat's inconsistent writing makes all of his "UwU this is the saddest scariest edgiest thing ever and it bothers me so much" moments jarring compared to all the shit that doesn't bother her but should.

Littlepip's nosy obsession with unearthing the secrets behind why and how pre-war places went to shit is so fucking retarded, too.
Kkat had the perfect excuse dropped in his own lap, by himself. He wrote that Scootaloo turned most vaults into experiments. So if Littlepip thought about this and said "I must learn the secrets behind the fall of these Stables so future generations can learn from their mistakes!" it would be good writing for once.

>>298017
>“She's had bad reactions to a Stable before. We better keep an eye on her.”
She disliked walking through an enemy-filled hellhole full of poisonous abominations. But she still speedran one to get you the antidote once your dumb ass got poisoned, Calamity, and she still blew it up and saved your ass. How the fuck is that a "bad reaction"? She didn't blow it up because she wanted to, she blew it up because she didn't want the monsters to spread! Are you talking about her "bad reaction" to a Stable where men are in charge? The author clumsily had her insist she doesn't have a problem with men in charge but hates the propaganda posters where mares cower in fear from a clogged sink only a heroic stallion could save them from. Calamity's talking like they're walking through a knife shop and Littlepip is known for slicing her wrists open for attention!

>misunderstanding where they think LP likes Calamity
You're a motherfucking genius! No homo but I love you. This would elevate this story and make slogging through all the edge and goomershit worth it to get to the love triangle moments!

>Calamity and Velvet's characterizations of each other
I wonder what these characters would say about Littlepip.
They'd probably take turns sucking her dick and calling her impressive while giving her all the credit for what the team did together.
But if Calamity's supposed to be a simple guy, Kkat should lean into that and make this an actual character trait. Write him talking to Littlepip about her higher ideals with curiousity while he says he's never thought much about higher ideals. He could mention he once knew ponies who had grand ideals, but got killed by them. Or say he used to believe in high ideals before the world decided to beat it out of him. Could write him arguing with Velvet, so he's mad at her for being inefficient and she's mad at him for not having her civilian morality.
Deep-ass discussions on dreams and goals and the future are great ways to characterize your characters. But only if it's written like an actual conversation where they comment on each other's dreams according to their personalities. If they just take turns spelling out their names and backstories and characterizations and goals for the audience artificially it's gay.
If you're going to do it artificially, just make the narrator spell shit out the characters would never mention on their own, like in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure pt5. It'd probably be improved if the Passione gang told each other their backstories during a "getting closer to each other" scene but it was a fast-paced story arc with little time for stuff like that.
Naruto had a great scene near the start where Kakashi asked his new team of 3 rookie ninjas for their names, likes, dislikes, and dreams. Solidifying who they are and what their dynamic will be for the audience's benefit. It makes sense since they were all strangers to him and he was genuinely trying to get to know them.
Naruto says he wants to be the next Ninja-President, Sakura says she wants Sasuke and hates Naruto and her dream is Sasuke(She was shallow back then), and Sasuke edgily says he likes nothing, hates a lot of things, and his dream is to kill his evil big brother.
Then Kakashi "Introduces himself" by telling them absolutely nothing about himself and he unexpectedly says he hates them all. Funny scene.

>>298069
Makes sense. I've heard things about the story but never read it. Couldn't get past the first chapter, fictional fully-female-dominated societies piss me off more than they probably should.
>>298077
I was told that character groomed/fucked someone way below her age but I've got no idea if it's correct or not.

>>298100
Theyre probably referring to the scene where scotch tape fucked bastard in the space ship like, less then 10 feet from her. Scotch tape is like 12, I think it makes sense given both of their backgrounds since theyre from stable 99 where they had... less then kino views about sex.

Other then that I cant think of anything. Blackjack will fuck just about anything that will move and would be jailbait in real life.

>>298099
Nigel, for the love of god. We know you're never gonna learn. You have made evident that you're like the guy from Memento, where a few day(a week at best) you'll 'learn your lesson' until the heat dies down, and then you'll go back to derailing and sperging about what the fuck ever.
But please, PLEASE stop gaslighting posters, proffering your "Nigel is a gud boi, he dindu nuffin" delusions. You know exactly why he has an issue with you. He and others - self included - have spelled it out to you in painstaking detail over a thousand times by now.
But you wont, you'll feign innocence, cool your jets for a few days, maybe a week, and then test the boundaries once again until you're back up to full speed.
Because you've been doing it for almost 4 years now. Its exhausting. Have some fucking decency.
But it's always someone else who has a problem, it's never anything you do. You're a gud boi, you dindu nuffin

>>298112
Sometimes I accidentally make off-topic posts but I work hard to make sure I don't do that any more. If my haters hated me for a valid reason, they would only rage at me when I did something wrong and they would clearly point out what is wrong in the moment. They wouldn't need to use vague terms and buzzwords to make their arguments for them. Dindu check, gaslighting check, movie reference for emotional reaction check, sperging check, delusion check, is this a record for the most buzzwords used in a guilt-slinging low-quality accusation of guilt? I'm surprised you didn't accuse me of being a jew in this post. I've been more on-topic in this thread than my haters. When I actually make mistakes, good people point them out clearly and explain how I can avoid doing them again in the future because that's constructive. Yelling at me when I do nothing wrong is not constructive. Trying to demonize and dehumanize me and paint me as someone who's calculating everything to troll everyone is not constructive. If I was a troll I wouldn't be a very good one. A troll takes pleasure from annoying others, and I don't give a fuck how my haters feel. It's best to ignore them and their attempts to trick others into joining in the dogpile. Nobody smart would fall for such obvious emotional manipulation anyway.
>>298104
That makes sense. That story sounds like a clusterfuck, do you think we'd be allowed to review it here if we skipped over the sex scenes?
>>298017
Come to think of it, does Littlepip's overpowered PipBuck and its enemy-detecting and map-making ability ruin the thrill and terror and uncertainty of exploring new dungeons?
That Pipbuck can detect enemies long before LP's eyes and ears can. She can't get jumpscared by enemies because she will always have that warning on her radar. She will always have a compass mark magically telling her where her Quwst Objective is too, making exploring an area to find something specific way too easy. I guess the author could build on that for terror by making her hide from hyper dangerous enemies in a locker or something while quietly and fearfully watching the pipbuck compass mark and hoping they would go away.

>>298015
Compared to how the vaults were presented in Fallout, FoE's conception of stables is... odd.

In the Fallout series, the vaults were marketed as comfortable long-term survival shelters for the population in the event of a nuclear war. Deep state actors who would eventually go on to become the Enclave after the war didn't truly believe that a nuclear exchange would occur, and secretly designed many of the vaults to include "social experiments" intended to study how humans behave in a closed environment. The vault experiments became more and more extreme and unethical as the series went on, particularly once Bethesda got their hands on it. As a result, most of the vaults eventually wound up abandoned (by choice, or because their residents all died). The few successful vaults that actually served their supposed purpose and weren't pillaged for their resources became the hearts of new population centers in the decades following the war, like Vault City in Fo1.

Vault 101's experiment was that it would never reopen - in practice, this just means it opened very late to justify Bethesda's giant timeskip in Fallout 3. Naturally, this is also the vault Stable 2 was based on. Other vault experiments included things like "what if we induce aggression in the population with white noise?" and "what if the entire population were retarded clones of one guy?"

So from the perspective of someone who's played the games, it's fair to expect abandoned vaults/stables whose residents died from wacky and gruesome experiments in a Fallout crossover. On paper at least, exploring a stable could make for a fun and/or spooky distraction. Fallout 3's conception of the vaults was essentially the precursor to Skyrim's dungeons, so the sidequest-style stable trips are at least predictable. But the ethical question of the stables being built around experiments casts a very dubious light on pre-apocalypse Equestria, to the story's detriment. I have *opinions* on this - Scootaloo is easily the most morally depraved character in FoE's wartime cast, for example; appropriately, Pip decides to take her as a moral role model. But I'll hold that back until it's relevant.

>>297837
>First of all, SteelWank is in a near-death condition as far as I can tell, and will probably die in a very short time if he doesn't receive medical attention.
Heh.

>>298100
>Makes sense. I've heard things about the story but never read it. Couldn't get past the first chapter, fictional fully-female-dominated societies piss me off more than they probably should.
If it helps, virtually everyone in Stable 99 ends up dead because the raider aids gets into their food supply. PH has bigger problems, but this isn't the thread for it.

>>298017

Anyway, moving on.

>I wondered just how long this had been going on. Was it new? Had there been signs that I was too oblivious to catch? Or had I just not wanted to catch them?
Well, there actually were quite a few signs that LP was quite oblivious to, but in any event I don't get the impression Velvet and Calamity are actually together at this point. So far they just seem to be in the flirty, liking-each-other-but-not-saying-it-out-loud stage.

The idea with this sort of romance plot is usually that the reader is supposed to pick up on things that blindside the protagonist. It's similar to a mystery story, where the Dr. Watson character is designed to be just slightly more clueless than the average reader would be, so that the reader can have the satisfaction of solving the mystery before he does. That's how it normally works, anyway; with kkat, who knows?

>The idea of “catching them” brought an entirely unwanted mental image of Velvet and Calamity to mind that I quickly shredded and burned.
Again, I don't think there's much going on physically, and they really wouldn't have had many opportunities anyway. However, I think this is mostly just LP overreacting.

>You know what would make being cheerful for them easy? A little pony in my head waved a tin at me. Fuck that little pony. I wanted to wallow just a little longer.
Oh right, she's like a drug addict now or something. If only this was something that was factored into her character overall, instead of being some weird thing that just pops up during moments where getting high on crack mints would solve a particular problem and then recedes into the ether again.

Anyway, she's wandering down the halls thinking about shit like this, when she comes across some kind of maintenance bot that has apparently been keeping this giant empty stable clean for 200 years, a la Wall-E.

>The robot started to clean in my direction. I decided to get out of its way by ducking into the Robotics Technician stall. The room was filled with maintenance bots in various states of disrepair. There were enough tools in here to upgrade Calamity’s workshop plans. I began looting.
You know, Littlepoop, maybe if you took some of the energy you normally spend on plundering random, useless crap that doesn't belong to you, and applied it towards figuring out how to win over your crush, you wouldn't be singing the lesbo-pony blues and daydreaming about popping cocaine-flavored tic-tacs right now. Just a thought.

Anyway, we've been through this enough times to know the drill. The next several paragraphs are dedicated to LP's exploration of this room. She obtains some more junk, most of which has no evident use or value, but I'm guessing there are at least two or three items in the collection that will suddenly factor into the story in like nine chapters. Naturally, there is a safe in the wall, which naturally she breaks into, and it naturally contains, among other various odds and ends, a sound recording, which, being the nosy Nellie that she is, she naturally plugs into her wrist-mo-bob and listens to.

Again, this whole episode follows a pattern that should be old hat to us by now: LP & Co. enter a dungeon, they poke around, they steal stuff, and LP begins finding recordings here and there that tell the story of whatever happened to the place they're exploring. The story of Stable 29 seems to revolve around a detail that was mentioned earlier but I didn't highlight: the Atrium does not appear to have an office for the Overmare, which LP finds unusual. The recording details an incident in which a pony died horribly due to some kind of error made by one of the robots. The speaker seems to be of the opinion that the stable ought to have some kind of authority or governing body, with the implication being that this error was due to some kind of lack of standards or authority or something.

I'm beginning to see a pattern. Each of these stables seems to have some kind of uniquely unusual characteristic, which suggests that they may have been intended as social experiments as well as being shelters from the magic-nuclear-explosion-whatever. This isn't entirely the product of my own reasoning; some of the spoilers people in the thread have dropped I believe have also suggested this, like this anon for example >>298180 . The last one had something to do with establishing a male-dominant society; this one so far seems to be some kind of experiment in anarchy, or at least in allowing a contained population to make its own decisions without formal rules or structure.

>I tried to shove the mental image of Cannikin out of my head, centering my thoughts instead on the idea of a Stable without an Overmare at all. A Stable run remotely by Stable-Tec.
Apparently this is what the author is getting at. Stable-Tec, I guess, owns and/or controls most of these places, but in this case they are deliberately taking a hands-off hooves-off, whatever approach.

There is a page break, and in the next scene Littlepoop has found the PipBuck technician room. She finds the key she needs quite easily, along with a few other tools that could come in handy should she ever need to do any advanced repair work on a PipBuck. She takes all of them, and on the way out she finds another recording sitting on the technician's desk, which contains yet another out of context sound clip. This one appears to deal with some kind of gun accident that occurred in the Stable. In the aftermath of this incident, some of the citizens I guess tried to form some sort of safety or rules commission, which I guess had to get approved by Stable-Tec or something.

As with most of this story's mythology, the purpose of Stable-Tec is not particularly well explained, nor is it clear what Littlepoop can be expected to know about it. As far as I can tell, it was a company that existed before/during the war. It may have been run by the CMC, and it is responsible for, among other things, the stables and the PipBucks.

>>298189

There is another page break, and LP is back at the clinic with Velvet.

>Velvet Remedy pushed three jars of extra-strength restoration potion over to me. “Drink these. You’ll be in perfect health in ten minutes.”
I really, really hate the way medicine works in this story. As if the magical cure-all potions we've encountered thus far weren't ridiculous enough, there apparently exists an "extra-strength" version. You know, for when you're really mortally wounded.

>Velvet Remedy shook her head. She was looking a lot better. She had stowed away her dress and removed her bandages; her hide was perfect, her coat looked pristine and healthy.
Have you been mortally wounded by a grenade launcher? Did you have half of your skin torn off by shrapnel? Is most of your blood currently watering the grass of the killing fields? When ordinary magical bandages and potions just won't cut it, you need to reach for a bottle of Extra-Strength Magical Clusterfuck Cure-All Panacea Butthole Salve™! Just rub a tiny palmful of this magic elixir all over your butthole, and in just minutes even the toughest mortal wounds will disappear without a trace. Were your legs blown off? Don't worry! Was your body ripped apart at the torso? We can cure that! Have you been decapitated and torn to shreds, with your various body parts express-mailed to different parts of the globe, where they were then dissolved in hydrofluoric acid, sealed into separate canisters, and launched into the cold vacuum of space? Don't even sweat it! As long as your butthole survived and someone can rub this elixir on it, you'll be just fine by morning.

In all seriousness, at this point I'm starting to have my doubts about this entire fandom (MLP I mean, not necessarily Fallout). Back when I was merely a spectator and not a participant, I remember being mostly puzzled by the brony phenomenon, and occasionally asking anons what the appeal was. One of the things I heard mentioned multiple times was the amount of fanfiction that had been written, and this story specifically was often cited as the best of the best. The show itself is enjoyable enough for what it is, and the shitposty aspects of the fandom are lots of fun, but I really have to question the intelligence of anyone who could read something like FoE and actually see it as a serious, high-quality work of fiction.

I wouldn't mind the ridiculousness so much if it didn't take itself seriously, but as far as I can tell the author is 100% serious about all of this. This premise could work as many different things: a campy hack and slash adventure, an action-comedy, or even as a satire of its own concept. Hell, even if the author wanted to go all grimdark with it and turn it into a serious "horrors of war" story it could be done, but in that case he'd have to drop the video game elements and melodrama and make it at least halfway believable, which he so far refuses to do. As far as I can tell, what he's trying to do is mash up a dark, serious video game with a colorful show about ponies, in order to create a story that deals with dark and serious themes and explores complex moral issues in the setting of a children's cartoon show.

Again, I fully believe it would be possible to do this well, but in this case it fails bigly. The author insists on taking the source material of both franchises 100% literally, which means that absurd cartoon elements from the series (ponies pulling a running steam train, for instance) as well as absurd video game elements from Fallout (healing potions for instance) are included as serious elements in a world that attempts to be serious. However, the result is so absurd it's impossible to take most of the story seriously.

For instance, despite being grievously wounded, the party just discovered enough of this magical panacea-potion to completely heal themselves. This shit was just sitting in a storage room. So what the hell is up with that atrium full of skeletons? Those ponies had access to the same magic elixir that LP & Co. just rubbed all over their buttholes. What happened there? How did all of these ponies die? Were they just not able to rub it on their buttholes in time, or what? Did someone lose the key to the storage closet? It just doesn't make any sense. The same goes for just about every death in this story. As I've said before, in a world where practically any injury can be healed just by downing a couple of potions, it's hard to take any threat seriously.

>I downed two of the extra-strength restoration potions and slipped the third into my saddlebags. Memories of Velvet, her hide shredded and bloody, had resurfaced in my mind. I could handle being mostly healed if it meant I had one of these ready in case of an emergency.
See, this shit right here is exactly what I'm talking about. Velvet's hide was shredded and bloody just a few short scenes ago, but now she's fine, and all she had to do was swallow a couple of teaspoons of some mysterious cure-all potion. Whatever sympathy we might have felt for Littlepoop after seeing her love interest nearly killed is completely negated if her injuries can be cured this easily. Having half of your hide torn off is about as serious as skinning your knee in this world, so the attempted drama feels maudlin and silly, and the vivid descriptions of blood loss and torn skin just sounds like the author being an over-the-top edgelord.

What are we supposed to take away from this? Velvet tells LP to swallow three magical cure-alls in order to completely heal all of her grievous injuries, but she only downs two of them, while saving the third in case Velvet gets injured again on the field, and we're supposed to see this as a tender act of self-sacrifice? It makes no sense. The storage room seems to be full of these things, and LP's saddlebag is basically it's own pocket dimension; there's no apparent limit to how many of these potions they can carry, so why not take as many as possible?

>>298193

>Calamity was also looking much better. He complained that after Velvet Remedy’s mending spell, the brace wasn’t really necessary, but she insisted he keep it on for at least another day.
This too. On some level I think the author realizes he's made medicine too powerful, so he feels the need to limit it. However, he can only do so with lukewarm measures like this one: Calamity breaks his leg, and it can be healed with magic and potions and stuff, but it's not completely healed; he still has to wear a brace for a couple of days. It was the same way with his wing when that was injured, as I recall, and it will probably be the same way with whatever he breaks next. None of this shit even matters anyway; even when the party is injured it doesn't seem to actually affect them. If you break your leg you can still walk, if you injure your wing you can still fly, if you lose half your skin and most of your blood you can still do just about anything you could before.

Anyway, I forget if I mentioned this or not but apparently while Velvet was looting supplies, she came across another one of those dumb sound recordings that Littlepoop collects because she's a nosy klepto. As soon as she chugs her healing potions, LP goes off to listen to it because it's not like she has anything better to do. I mean, it's not like some cyborg soldier who risked himself to save her is currently lying immobilized somewhere, slowly and painfully dying of internal bleeding, while these retards are wandering around this abandoned stable looking for extra band-aids.

So, you might as well poke around and see if there are any old cassette tapes lying around that you might want, eh LP? If you find any rare black metal demos or anything let me know.

>I found a chemistry lab in the back of the clinic. For a moment, all thoughts of the recording fled my mind. Looking over the drugs and supplies, I realized that along with what I had already, I had all the ingredients to cook up my own batch of Party-Time Mint-als!
Oh, and while you're at it, why don't you see if they've got the stuff you need to set up your own meth lab? You've got nothing but time, LP, nothing but time.

>And having the ability and opportunity, I couldn’t resist. It would have been silly to.
Kkat, I think you and I are working from radically different definitions of the word "silly."

>As I started work, I remembered why I had come back here.
To find some kind of key so you could open the utility panel for that guy's armor so he doesn't die, even though between all the walking and napping and exploring and looting and now meth cooking you've been doing he's probably been dead for hours by now? Oh wait, you found that key already. So wait a minute, why are you still down here again?

>I let the recording play as I ground down the regular, boring old Mint-als into a fine powder.
Oh that's what you meant. When you said "I remembered why I had come back here," I was assuming you were talking about the important, time-sensitive, life-and-death task you were supposed to be carrying out right now. However, you were talking about the reason you had specifically entered this room, which was to pop your headphones on and listen to some complete stranger's diary from 200 years ago. Sorry, my bad.

>The voice was so filled with raw despair that I quickly shut the recording off. I didn’t want to hear that.
I was just shitposting earlier, but maybe she actually did find an old black metal tape.

Anyway, she goes back to cooking her fucking drugs, but sooner or later her nosy Nellie side gets the best of her, and she plays the tape. The contents are about what you'd expect: there was some kind of malfunction with the fire suppression system, and it sounds like it flooded the clinic or something and drowned whoever was inside.

>I shut it off again. My heart was twisted up in knots. Part of me wanted to cry. Part wanted to rage at something. But there wasn’t anything obvious to rage at.
If you're looking for something to rage at, you could probably start with the fact that you came down here to find something you need to save a guy's life, and here you are cooking drugs and listening to old tapes.

Oh, why do I even care? We all know perfectly well the soldier's not dead. This is FoE; injuries here don't actually kill you. When the party returns to the spot where they left Roboponer, he's going to be in exactly the same state as he was before. Littlepoop will use her new key-thingy to open up his armor-panel-whoosit, and then she can repair his 200 year old cybernetic life-support system using only the skills she picked up as an apprentice technician fixing a type of device that is basically just a glorified Nintendo-DS. Everything will be just fine; she could stay down here goofing around for another ten years and absolutely nothing on the surface world will have changed.

Anyway, while she's occupied with all this retarded bullshit, she suddenly hears machine guns firing and runs off to rescue Velvet's sexy ass from whatever horrible stable-monster is attacking it inb4 it turns out that Calamity has a robotic penis that sounds like a machine gun when he ejaculates. She runs back to wherever she was before, the clinic I guess, and sees that for no apparent reason the gun turrets that I guess are in there have become active and started attacking them because why not. However, this turns out to be no big deal, because Littlepoop destroys them both with literally two shots. Yes, you read that correctly. Two giant-ass robotic gun turrets. Destroyed with two shots. One shot each. From her revolver.

Also, she gets injured by the turrets, but let's face it; that hardly matters. All she has to do is rub some elixir on her butthole and she'll be right as rain, and she's surrounded by literal gallons of the stuff. Instead, she focuses on what's really important: making sure her drugs don't overcook. The scene ends with a page break.

>>298196
Gg, I wrote this. Could you give me some feedback.
Actually set in the FE universe.

>>298189
>>You know what would make being cheerful for them easy? A little pony in my head waved a tin at me.
This author is really bad at integrating her crack mint addiction into the story and her internal monologue.

>Fuck that little pony.
No, fuck THIS little pony! Littlepip fucking SUCKS!

>I wanted to wallow just a little longer
Littlepip: Leave me alone to wallow in whatever it is mary sues wallow in!

>The robot started to clean in my direction
IF THERE'S A CLEANING BOT AROUND HERE WHY ARE THERE SKELETONS
WHY WOULDN'T IT CLEAN THE SKELETONS
AND SHOVE THEM INTO A RANDOM LOCKER SO WHEN LITTLEPIP OPENS IT, THE SKELETONS FALL ON HER
AND SHE GETS THOROUGHLY SPOOKED

>If healing items are so effective and plentiful why do people die? Why are there any still around after 200 years?
The lore of the games solved this problem by saying health-restoring "Stimpaks" and inferior tribal "Healing Powder" can be manufactured even in the post-apocalypse. Kkat forgot about this by making do-anything potions so much better than they should be and only rare when he wants them to be.
So much of this story is written like he never wanted to do a second draft that stripped out the loot that couldn't be looted and didn't turn out to be important later.
If he didn't want LP and friends to take all of this healing potion, why did he put it there? Why not say "All of these health potions were made by a mechanical doctor that fucked up the recipe, creating poison that smells like healing potion and the only useable health potion here was hoofmade with that chemistry set"?
What, is team LP going to leave most of the healing potions behind and then come back for them once they have a car?
"We must travel light and avoid picking up too much junk" would make sense in a realistic world where carrying 20 pounds on your back is hard. BUT LITTLEPIP LIFTED BOXCARS! Go get her a boxcar-sized flat metal tray and she could carry all the health potions she wanted.

There are "New-U Stations" in Borderlands. They're respawn points just like in The Godfather and Spongebob Squarepants: Battle For Bikini Bottom, but with a dumb joke voice line that plays every time you respawn like "We here at Hyperion are always happy to revive you and take your money!".
That dumb joke and respawn fee and early-game tutorial "Characters explain videogame functions and vending machines" scenes means they canonically exist within the world so shitloads of players are unable to take emotional death scenes seriously. If I respawn when shot, why don't the NPCs who die during cutscenes?
Nobody goes out of their way to depower or imprison or cripple a foe specifically because "The second that bastard dies, he respawns at the nearest New-U Station in peak physical condition! So he needs to stay in this prison and not die!"
You'll eventually meet the NPCs behind the health vending machines and guns vending machines, and the Catch A Ride station that infinitely respawns your cars canonically exists, so you expect the respawn vending machine to also exist. Yet the whole world functions as if it doesn't, despite how much attention was drawn to it.
It's incredibly jarring and probably the biggest moment of bad writing in these games if you don't count spoiler stuff.
There comes a point where you're better off not drawing attention to videogamey things like respawn points, or +1 Life Pickups or Reviver seeds, or an impossibly all-knowing HUD that can tell you the names of important people while giving disposable randomly-generated NPCs names like Raider Scavver and Defias Cutpurse, or your arbitrary maximum inventory size, or level-ups and RPG stats, or dice-roll based bullshit, or your ability to save and pause and reload a game, or how the player character's insane luck makes him more likely to find a fully loaded military-grade gun in a random bizarre spot than you are to find a penny on the street.
And if something like this isn't it, what is?
If you don't have a clever meta justification for this unrealistic bullshit, shut up about it and let gamers willingly suspend their disbelief for it, and don't take this bullshit with you into literature unless the world's SUPPOSED to work like an easily-exploitable RPG.
And if this world IS supposed to work like a RPG, why isn't Littlepoop reloading her gun faster by switching weapons?

>Having half of your hide torn off is about as serious as skinning your knee in this world, so the attempted drama feels maudlin and silly, and the vivid descriptions of blood loss and torn skin just sounds like the author being an over-the-top edgelord
Could be worse. Littlepip could be a group of five or more ordinary human teenagers in the 90s given the power to morph into animals by a scorpion-tailed blue centaur alien, but despite the constant nearly-fatal hyper-edgy child-unfriendly wounds inflicted by assorted aliens and rayguns, changing from human to animal and back will insta-heal you and cause a spontaneous gratuitous body horror scene for everyone except your mary sue who gets to look pretty/cute when morphing because Kunt A. Assholegate says so.

>>298196
Wait a fucking second, a "Chemistry set" could be used to make 5 free Stimpaks or a set of free drugs (1 each of Psycho, Jet, Steady, Buffout, Rebound, and Mentats) in FNV during the opening tutorial.
Elijah's one in Dead Money only made Cloud Residue (it's a long story but i deleted it for being off-topic) but if this fucking Chemistry Set is so great it can be used to make any drug whenever she wants, why is she making crack mints instead of MORE HEALTH POTIONS?
What's with this "JESSE WE NEED TO COOK!" moment?!
Realistically, a single health potion should be worth its weight in gold! Or better yet, bullets and sweet guns!
Unless health potions are easier to produce than bread once you have the required parts and tools to make it, making it cheaper than chips in isolated walled cities with "civilization" and dark secrets yet painfully rare out there in the wastes.

>turrets
LP why u no hack turrets

>>298265
>Could be worse. Littlepip could be a group of five or more ordinary human teenagers in the 90s given the power to morph into animals by a scorpion-tailed blue centaur alien, but despite the constant nearly-fatal hyper-edgy child-unfriendly wounds inflicted by assorted aliens and rayguns, changing from human to animal and back will insta-heal you and cause a spontaneous gratuitous body horror scene for everyone except your mary sue who gets to look pretty/cute when morphing because Kunt A. Assholegate says so.
Shut your whore mouth, yeerkfucker. Animorphs was great.

>>298196
>The Atrium door had closed and locked. We were sealed inside.
Considering what this place was designed for, it's unlikely the door was meant to stand open for a long period of time. It probably has some sort of timer on it that closes it automatically after a few minutes. In fact, I'd be amazed if all of the stables didn't have something like this.

>It was more of an aggravation than a real worry. I knew that I should be able to override every door in this place from the Security station.
Of course. I'd hate to think the author was going to give this group any sort of actual challenge to overcome; his time would be far better spent writing out a long, detailed list of all the random crap that Littlepoop finds in some old desk drawer.

>But reaching it meant getting past several more points where the suddenly trigger-happy security system could attack us.
Oh, okay, so there's kind of a challenge. Well, that's something I guess.

>I looked to my companions. By now, I was beginning to think of us as seasoned warriors of the wasteland (well, at least Calamity and I).
I notice that Littlepoop seems to regard Velvet with a certain amount of disdain whenever she's assessing the group's combat abilities. It's true enough that Velvet isn't much of a fighter, or a fighter at all, but condescension doesn't seem like the right attitude for her to have towards a pony she's supposed to be in love with.

Generally, when you've got a tough-guy or girl, I suppose hero character who sees a smaller, weaker, gentler character as a romantic interest, the hero usually develops protective feelings for her. However, with Littlepoop this is a little weird anyway, since even though she's supposed to be the tough, seasoned hero and Velvet is the gentle, naive pacifist who has to be rescued all the time, we also have this dynamic that was established earlier, in which Velvet is the sexy, sophisticated pop star and Littlepoop is just a mousy little fangirl who has a crush on her. What's weird is that LP seems to slip in and out of these modes at random; sometimes she's the tough, hardened warrior getting angry at Velvet for being too weak and sentimental, but then a scene or two later she's back to gibbering, lovestruck fangirl mode. Really the whole romance dynamic between these two feels completely insincere anyway, and a big part of it is that neither of these characters are particularly well developed to begin with.

Also, it's pretty damned arrogant for Littlepoop to be thinking of herself as a "seasoned warrior of the wasteland." She uses her S.A.T.S. to handle her targeting 95% of the time; if she had to rely entirely on her own aim she wouldn't be able to kill shit. Her PipBuck also has built-in radar that helpfully tells her the location of all of her enemies before she encounters them, so it's virtually impossible for anyone to get the drop on her. Most of her tactical advantages in battle come from her having a PipBuck, and the rest is just bullshit that comes from her being the author's favored Mary Sue OC, like her hacking ability and her lockpicking ability and her inexplicable ability to levitate preposterously huge things like boxcars. If a serious writer were to put this character in a serious version of this setting and take away her PipBuck, Littlepoop would probably be dead by the end of the second or third chapter.

>Velvet Remedy was looking at me sadly. I think I was fast enough, but I was guessing that she suspected what I was up to in the chemistry lab. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me since, and the reproachful look was burning into my soul.
Velvet's pity for Littlepoop's newfound drug addiction feels almost as tacked on as Littlepoop's newfound drug addiction.

Anyway, the problem now is that the door is locked, and the only way to open it apparently involves going to the security room in the special VIP area that apparently replaces the Overmare's quarters in this particular stable. Calamity finds a map, and they head off in that direction.

>We moved towards the stairs, stopping at a bulletin board covered in the usual notices. I shrank back; somepony had written “STOP KILLING US!” across the board in what looked like blood.
Sacrebleu! Le edge!

>“Oh my,” Velvet whispered. To my surprise, she magically tugged one of the notices off the board, floating it closer for inspection. The notice had been between a posting of new safety regulations and a flier for two missing fillies whose smiling faces had stared into an atrium of corpses for centuries.
Mon dieu! Le edge! LE EDGE!!

Anyway, apparently this flyer that Velvet finds is advertising an old concert with none other than Vinyl Scratch as the DJ. Why this information would be important enough that any of them would stop and take notice of it is the kind of question I should probably have learned to stop asking by now. Calamity notes with mild surprise that it looks like Vinyl had survived the balefire bomb after all. Littlepoop grumbles to herself about how much she dislikes stables, and then there's a page break.

>Between stealth and Little Macintosh, the other turrets proved little threat.
Oh, good. I'd really hate to have the story sidetracked by something as mundane as a trek through a creepy abandoned bunker where murder-turrets could attack at any given moment. Anything that distracts from descriptions of Littlepoop manufacturing homemade drugs or cracking old safes open is just a waste of page space, in my opinion. Come on, kkat! Get to the looting already! What does LP find in the security room? An old shoe? A 200 year old can of Bush's™ Baked Beans? More drugs? Come on, I need to know! Does she ever find all the crap she needs to build that stupid needle gun she's trying to make? The suspense is killing me! Quit wasting our time with all of this action and adventure and just get to the important stuff, for land's sake.

>>298362

>I sat down to hack the terminal, trying to be respectful as I floated the pony skeleton off of it and laid it down in the corner near the others.
You know, it occurs to me that they might be misinterpreting history a bit here. Did it ever occur to any of these ponies that old Edgequestria might have been ruled by a noble race of skeletons, and they're all under a sleeping spell right now?

Anyway, Littlepoop of course effortlessly hacks the terminal, and of course the first thing she does is open the door to the armory so Calamity can loot it. While she's at it, she of course decides to root around in the old security logs.

The logs she finds are pretty much standard fare by now. Apparently the Stable developed some sort of artificial intelligence and began attacking the ponies inside for no reason; either that, or the Stable-Tec guys who were remotely controlling it got bored and decided to have some fun. It actually appears to be the latter. In any event, blood and guts and carnage abound, and no explanation is given for why Stable-Tec would want to do this to them exactly.

It's not clear whether the logs are text files or audio files, but I'm guessing audio as Velvet seems to be affected by them as well. Littlepoop becomes overwhelmed by emotion as she sifts through the various files.

>I reached to trigger another when Velvet Remedy physically pulled me away from the terminal.
>"WHAT!?" I yelled in pure rage, my body shaking so hard I felt like I would explode.
>"Littlepip," she said, and I realized she was crying, "You need to stop."
I literally burst out laughing when I read this. Most writers would take that as a warning flag that maybe they didn't convey quite the emotional timbre they were going for.

So, if I'm understanding it correctly, the situation here is that Stable-Tec put all of these ponies down here, locked them in with no Overmare, and then started shooting at them and killing them all of a sudden. One question springs to mind: WHY?

It doesn't seem like it, but this is really not that difficult a question to answer. The trick is to realize that you're not supposed to actually think about it. That some giant corporation would go to all the trouble of building a huge facility that probably cost billions of dollars bits, whatever, just so they could throw a few ponies in there and murder them for no reason, would provoke curiosity in a normal person. However, once you understand the logic of Fallout: Equestria, it becomes quite simple.

Stable-Tec murdered the inhabitants of this stable for the same reason that the slavers round up children and the raiders decorate their bedrooms with the guts of their enemies: they're bad baddies, who do bad things because they are bad. Their only role in the story is to be as edgy and evil as they possibly can. In other words, it's pure shock value. The reader is supposed to be so utterly horrified by the horrors of this horrible horror that they never realize that the whole scenario is absurd to the point of being actually funny.

Earlier I mentioned the movie Crank as an example of a story that is completely absurd, but still manages to be entertaining and fun. The secret of a story like that is that it's aware of how ridiculous it is, and it deliberately pushes its ridiculousness to the furthest extreme possible. A formula like that could easily work with a premise like this, since frankly the premise is completely ridiculous to begin with. However, it would need some self-awareness to be able to do this.

A film like Crank is in the category of "bad on purpose." Sure it's bad, but it knows its bad, and it's trying to be bad, and that's why it's fun to watch. Meanwhile, the sort of film you could compare FoE to would probably be something like The Room; a terrible, pointless story written by a complete hack who has no idea that he's a hack, and who legitimately believes he has something beautiful and important to share with the world.

Nearly everything in FoE is completely and obviously ridiculous, yet it presents these absurd situations without any apparent irony or humor. As far as I can tell, the author is trying for a serious, heart-wrenching moment here; the story of Stable 29 is supposed to be horrifying beyond belief, and we are meant to genuinely feel for Littlepoop's reaction here. Some big bad meanie corporation rounded up thousands of ponies and stuck them in an underground bunker and then gruesomely murdered them for no obvious reason, and now Littlepoop, who is listening to a recording that someone, for some reason, made of this event and then saved on their computer terminal, is tearing her hair out and screaming "oh the horror of it all!" while Velvet sobs in the background. The fact that this entire scene is being acted out by cartoon ponies pushes it completely over the edge for me; this scene is quite possibly the funniest fucking thing I've read all year.

It keeps going after the page break, too:

>I was seeing red like never before, and I couldn't even attack the source of my anger because they were all dead. Dead decades and centuries ago. My body hadn't stopped shaking.
You read it here folks: Littlepoop is literally shaking right now.

Anyway, while she is in this state of whatever the fuck, she randomly comes across Vinyl Scratch's old room, because why the hell not?

>The room inside had been untouched since the night of the party, three months after the door of Stable Twenty-Nine closed, trapping everypony inside.
And she knows this how? I went back over the sound recordings, and I didn't see anything in there that provided any of these details. The only clue I can see about the three month thing is that the flyer calls it a "three month survival party," which I suppose implies that the party took place three months after the group entered the stable. Assuming they were locked in from the very beginning this would make sense.

>>298362
>Velvet pities the junkie
Is it really right for Velvet to take pity on a junkie?
She's a formerly-rich bitch celebrity from her stable's upper crust.
If she wasn't constantly surrounded by drug-taking celebrity faggots who ruined their boring lives through addiction, she should have an absolute hatred for drugs and the 'lowlife lowborn stable-scum' that takes them for fun.

>VIP area
If there is no leader, why even have a VIP area or name it such? If it's necessary for something as important as opening and closing the vault door that keeps your stable protected from the outside world, why not put the security specialists/experts in charge of it?
Also, Kkat's a faggot for badly writing this leaderless Vault. Leaderless zones don't stay leaderless for long. Eventually someone good at managing and planning and getting others to listen to him basically ends up in charge of (at the very least) a good chunk of the zone. If someone good at managing doesn't take over, someone who thinks he should manage things eventually will.
Why the hell would the absence of an "Overseer", the all-powerful boss with "Watch the cameras everywhere" as his job, the faggot who's in charge of the all-powerful "Stable Security" militarized police force, result in the stable lacking any kind of authority or responsibility?
If the automated security starts fucking up, which mechanic is in charge of fixing it? Which mechanic is the boss of other mechanics in charge of training new mechanics, if one exists?
If you think the automated security system is malfunctioning and killing innocents, what's stopping you from bugfixing that or getting a mob to destroy the easily-smashed gun turrets if it's not whoever's really in charge?
And if this Stable gets its orders directly from Stable-Tec instead of a local Overseer...
1. How did Stable-Tec survive? In a normal experiment-free stable of their own?
2. What the fuck kind of experiment in "Anarchy" does that make this, if this civilization needs the permission of a company to wipe its own ass and/or was effectively ruled by the facility's own guns?
3. When the gun turrets got this genocidal, how did they stay functional for this long if it's easy enough for Littlepoop to take them out with her mediocre hunting pistol? During the start of this Kung Flu panic, people smashed up 5G towers thinking they had something to do with it. And possibly smashed up some power lines that looked like 5G towers but there might have been feds doing that instead to make the anti-5G guys look bad.
4. AIs don't just "happen" and come out of nowhere like a videogame spawning in a new enemy. AIs are fucking hard to make! What retarded fucking Assman-tier Anti-Humanist Transhumanist Double-Nigger Moment of anti-logic caused a robot to think genociding all of its poners was its job?

>"Littlepip," she said, and I realized she was crying, "You need to stop. Your crack addiction is tearing this family apart!"
Littlepip: There are spiders under my skin and secrets to uncover in the journals and terminal entries of long-dead ponies!!!

This reminds me of a Vault in Fallout NV that seems brilliant at first but falls apart once you think about it. It's that Vault where the Overseer is elected for a year, then killed.
So big Voting Blocs form to rule the vault and vote for anyone who displeases them, and posters saying "Carl is a communist sympathizer, vote Carl for overseer!" coat the walls.
This shit went on for about 200 years without any change.
Eventually one person got voted into power and decided to actually use the Overseer's absolute power to replace voting with a random lottery. So a civil war happened and fucktons died.
All but 6ish vault occupants died. They agreed to vote nobody in as Overseer even if it gets them killed.
The vault said "Congratulations! You've proven humans will not execute one human a year even if we tell them to."
Sad, the survivors agreed to make an edgy audio log and leave it on the floor so random looters can find it. Then they all kill themselves except I think some chickened out.
Anyway this vault sounds smart and deep at first but was really dumb and edgy in retrospect. It's like this Stable, because at first it's horrifying but then you realize it's kind of funny.
But it's still a step above this piece of shit Stable where poners exist in an underground facility that gradually kills them over time for no fucking reason. Come on, where's the GLADOS AI that likes testing stuff even if it kills? Where's the lesson here, besides "Not everyone can write"?
At least Shadow The Hedgehog's stupid "Everyone in this expensive facility was killed for no reason" backstory got aliens retconned in to be less retarded.

>be Eggman's grandfather
>daughter has super-AIDS named NIDS
>take her to Space Colony Arc
>make giant lizard and Shadow The Hedgehog while trying to cure her Space AIDS
>collab with genocidal alien Devil Doom and his race the Black Arms on Shadow
>Guardian Unit of Nations (GUN) slaughters everyone on the ARK including Maria
>brainwash+freeze Shadow until Sonic Adventure 2

Remember that time Littlepip linked her PipBuck's targeting program to some turrets, so they'd open fire on anything her PipBuck considered an enemy to her while sparing her and her friends?
Bet the dead poners wish they thought of that.
If LP did that upon entering the stable, she wouldn't have to purge the vault of anything violent towards her like the gun-turrets.
Her PipBuck's never fucked up and labelled a potential friend as a Hostile(TM) before, so it's not like doing this would make a spiteful Dungeon Master say "This vault actually had survivors who were starving so badly they'd rob anyone they encountered... but they could have totally been reasoned with if you tossed some food their way. Unfortunately your trick made the automated turrets kill them all. Yes, even though these turrets were already killing ponies so these survivors would have no reason to go near the damn things. Shut the fuck up and enjoy the edge."

>>298363

What isn't clear, though, is why this room would be untouched since the night of the party, or how LP would know this for a fact. For this to be the case, Vinyl would have to have died on the night of the party, or at least stopped using this room after the party. Is the implication here that the night of the party was the same night that all the brutal slaughter detailed in the last batch of recordings took place?

As usual, timelines here are vague; all we really know is that Stable-Tec, for some bizarre reason, was using its remote control of the stable to murder all of its inhabitants. It started off by killing a few here and there using events that appeared to be accidents, but eventually it just unleashed an all-out bloodbath, using the automated gun turrets that were placed all around (this seems like kind of a strange design feature in the first place). However, we don't know how long this took or when any of these events occurred. It's possible that the accidents took place over the course of three months, and the bloodbath occurred on the night of the party; however, if this is the case it's not clearly stated anywhere. They could have just as easily been down there for years and years before any of this started happening.

However, what I think the author is getting at is that the "accidental" killings were taking place over the first three months, and then at the concert Stable-Tec decided to kill everyone at once. More than likely, the concert was held in the atrium and this is probably what all the skeletons in there are supposed to be about.

Anyway, Littlepoop wanders around Vinyl's old room, looking at all of her stacks of records and DJ equipment and whatever the fuck, thinking to herself that she could just randomly break all of this shit to relieve some of the stress she is feeling about all the ancient murders or whatever. However, she doesn't quite feel right about destroying the beloved possessions of a pony who was just another victim of the evil meanie-pants baddie corporation that was bad because badness. So, she decides to do the decent thing: steal those possessions instead. She goes through Vinyl's old record collection, takes whatever the fuck she wants because she's a goddamn klepto, and wanders off, once again feeling as though she has somehow done something noble here.

>When I returned to the others, I would have Velvet Remedy lock them in one of her medical boxes where it would be safe from bullet fire. I still remembered that apple.
If transporting vinyl records or wax 78s or whatever the fuck they have in Equestria across the wasteland is such a complex and delicate task, why not just leave them where they are? Why do you need these records? Why do you need any of the junk you pick up? You need help, girl.

Also, what apple? What the fuck are you even babbling about, you loony twat?

Since it wouldn't be a room in Fallout: Equestria if there wasn't a safe, Littlepoop of course finds a safe. She of course "hesitates," because she "doesn't feel quite right about this," but of course this feeling doesn't ultimately stop her. She breaks into the safe, which of course just contains sentimental objects of Vinyl's that are of no practical use to Littlepoop or anyone in her party.

However, for no obvious reason, there are also four memory orbs in there. One of them is called "Pinkie Pie's Last Party," so she takes that one and leaves everything else.

After doing this, she leaves Vinyl's room, and goes to another room marked "Shadowhorn," which I guess was the name of someone important in Stable 29. The name was mentioned a few times in the recordings. Since LP has apparently completely forgotten about both her friends and the probably now dead cyborg soldier she was supposed to be trying to rescue, and since she can hardly resist the opportunity to rifle through another dead stranger's belongings, she goes inside.

>The mare in charge of maintenance was a V.I.P. in the Stable? Even in the midst of my barely-reined fury at Stable-Tec, my pure hatred towards whom could not be told, part of my brain recognized that seemed odd.
I had to read this like five times before I figured out what the hell the author was trying to say here. This is easily one of the most awkwardly-written sentences in the entire book.

Anyway, she goes into this dead cunt's room and, surprise surprise, there's another goddamn safe in there, which she of course breaks into. There is another recording inside.

>When the safe opened, it revealed another recording. This one looked startlingly similar to the one I found in the Overstallion’s office.
Couple of things here. For one, I thought there was no Overstallion here, and that was the whole point of this place. For another, since it specifically says Overstallion and not Overmare, I'm assuming what the author means is that the recording resembles the one LP found earlier at the other stable, the one that was so shocking because it had a boy leader instead of a girl leader. Since that happened like forty forevers ago and I don't even remember what that recording was even about, let alone what it looked like, we should probably go back and see what the description of the first one was.

>But within his locked safe, I found both it and the recipe, as well as an old recording. My guess was that it was his last words.
This is literally all the text has to say about the Overstallion's recording found all the way back in Chapter 5. So, if a description of the first recording is never given, how exactly is it helpful to tell us later that a second recording resembles it? The answer: it's not helpful. It's not helpful at all. It's also not helpful that the text has yet to even give us a description of any recording; the only reason I have even a vague idea of what these mystery objects look like is because a helpful anon in this thread gave a brief description of the ones in the game.

>>298367

Anyway, she plays the recording itself, and...hoo boy. Let's just say that the actual truth of what happened here is different from what the text has thus far been hinting at, but it's no less ridiculous. In fact, it may actually be more ridiculous. This recording is probably worth going through closely, because there's quite a bit of information in here.

>Hello, Shadowhorn! The following is for your ears only. I am speaking to you because you have been selected for a very important job, due to your sense of loyalty and duty both to this company and the ponies around you.
This appears to be another super-sekrit message from Vice President Scootaloo at Stable-Tec to the Overmare, or Chief Security Officer, or Designated Shitting Pony, or whatever, from this particular stable. The format resembles the one which opened Chapter Six, if anyone gives enough of a shit to go back and read it.

>Hello, my name is Scootaloo, and I’m the vice-president of Stable-Tec. If you’re hearing this, that means that the Omega-Level Threat Protocols have been enacted...
Blah blah blah, the magical nukes went off and everyone is dead now, time to implement Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Anyway, after her preamble, Scoots basically tells Shadowfax that in addition to being a survival bunker, Stable 29 has been selected to participate in some kind of social experiment:

>but there is a higher purpose to your Stable, beyond saving individual ponies. We here at Stable-Tec understand that it doesn’t do ponykind any good to save ourselves now only to annihilate each other later. We must figure out where we went wrong. We must find a better way. And we must be ready to implement it as soon as possible once the Stable doors open.
Normally, a speech like this would imply that Stable-Tec probably wants #29 to implement some kind of bullshit common-core style learning program in which tolerance and friendship and shit is taught to the young, in order that the next generation of little ponies won't want to annihilate each other with nuclear missiles or whatever the fuck. However, in this story, I'm assuming it will be something about rampaging killbots instead.

She goes off on a bit of a tangent after this, mostly spouting cliched lines like:
>dammit. How did we come to this?
and
>Bad decisions, emotional decisions… they’ve dragged us into a war nopony wanted. They’ve pushed us to the brink of extinction
and
>dammit all to hell. Damn us all to hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WQCoPL3-wo

Anyway, she eventually gets back on topic, and once she does we get some interesting tidbits of information:

>Your Stable has a very exceptional design. Despite the official documents, this Stable has no remote connection to Stable-Tec whatsoever. Instead, replacing the normal Overmare position, we have fitted Stable Twenty-Nine with a Crusader-class computer system.
So, apparently, it wasn't Stable-Tec who intentionally murdered everypony for no reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LGu1sOvxYs
The question now, of course, is who did?

>The Crusader-class Maneframe is the most advanced supercomputer ever created by ponykind, using the greatest available improvements in arcano-technology. The Crusader is capable of independent thought, creativity and learning.
Oh, sweet baby Jesus. I think I see where this is going. Also: "maneframe?" Seriously? There's a time when cutesy horse puns are appropriate, and now does not feel like one of those times.

>The goal of this social experiment it to remove the emotional, fallible pony from the equation. To see if we can do better through a pragmatic and logical system of government that is not subject to our own faults.
Yep, it's basically what I was afraid of. This is another "artificially intelligent supercomputer goes awry and kills everyone" episode. It's a first for this story, but it's bringing back some unpleasant memories of Assman and his "Celest-AI" spergery.

Anyway, there's some other shit in here that I'll get to in a minute, but the long and short of it is that the Cutie Mark Crusaders built some kind of magic supercomputer, which they gave to this stable in order to test as part of some kind of experiment in AI government. Naturally, this machine went amok and killed everyone in the stable.

What happened specifically is that some little kid accidentally shot the magic crystal thingy that generates drinking water (this is mentioned in one of the earlier recordings), and he caused some kind of permanent damage to it. The diminishing supply of drinking water caused the computer to reason that the population needed to be reduced, so it killed a few of the ponies. However, since the water crystal couldn't be repaired, the supply kept dwindling so the computer had to kill more ponies. Eventually the supply ran out completely, so it decided to just kill all the ponies at once.

There are several WTFs here. First of all, it seems like a pretty stupid idea to do something like this in the first place. If this AI has never been tested before, it makes little sense to test it in the middle of a life or death survival situation where literally thousands of things can go wrong. However, I get the impression that this was basically the author's point, so we can probably skip that one.

More pertinent is that the latter part of the recording details measures that this Shadowbolt character could use to manually take control of the system if it ever went awry. If it started killing ponies a few at a time, it seems like it should have been obvious to Shadowcat that it was doing something it shouldn't, so why weren't the override controls implemented? However, I actually suspect hope the author may be going somewhere with this, so I'll skip that one for now as well.

I'm running out of space, so I will finish this thought in a new post.

>>298376
>What happened specifically is that some little kid accidentally shot the magic crystal thingy that generates drinking water (this is mentioned in one of the earlier recordings), and he caused some kind of permanent damage to it. The diminishing supply of drinking water caused the computer to reason that the population needed to be reduced, so it killed a few of the ponies. However, since the water crystal couldn't be repaired, the supply kept dwindling so the computer had to kill more ponies. Eventually the supply ran out completely, so it decided to just kill all the ponies at once.
I'll give Kkat one tiny bit of credit here - this ties together a handful of things from the Fallout games quite cleverly. Janky, homicidal AIs suffering from logic errors show up frequently in all of the games so this sort of scenario isn't out of place in a Fallout story. Fallout 1 establishes that vaults rely on a small but vital component known as a 'water chip' to process their water supplies. And in Fallout 3, the shooting tutorial is framed as your (character's) father taking your ten year old self down to the maintenance level to practice with the BB gun he gives you for your birthday. Broadly speaking, the scenario makes a degree of sense and a tragic story could probably be spun out of it with a little effort.

However, as with most things in FoE it's integrated with the rest of the story in a very slipshod manner.

>>298376

The big issue as I see it is that the water crystal was damaged beyond repair. This whole tragedy is being presented as the end result of some monumental error in judgement on Stable-Tec's part, but neither Stable-Tec nor their AI are ultimately responsible for what happened. The crystal was damaged by accident, but once it was damaged it was irreparable, so everyone would have died sooner or later anyway. While I'm sure being suddenly murdered by killbots in the middle of a rave must have been unpleasant for most of these little poners, it was probably a lot less agonizing than slowly dying of thirst would have been. This was basically a situation where death was inevitable for everyone; the only choice would be when and how.

The author seems to want to emphasize the horror of this soulless machine ruthlessly murdering the living beings under its care because it made some calculation and determined that it was necessary. The message, such as it is, seems to tie in to what I have heard others in this thread refer to as the main theme of this work: that good intentions can lead to evil results. Here, the implication seems to be that Stable-Tec meant well: they created a government AI in the hopes that a purely rational machine wouldn't make the same impulsive and emotional decisions that a pony would. But, their good intentions ultimately produced this horrible result. That seems to be what the author is trying to communicate, as far as I can tell.

However, as I said, the reality is that whether this stable was being run by a machine or a pony, the leadership would have needed to deal with the same reality, which is that the water-jiggy was broken, it couldn't be repaired, and everypony was going to die one way or the other. The computer didn't break the water-whoosit, nor did the kid who shot it do so deliberately, but the end result was ultimately the same: it was irreparably damaged, and everyone in the stable was therefore doomed.

You could look at it this way: the machine probably made the right call by putting everyone to death quickly and...eh...relatively...painlessly with a mass shooting, instead of letting them all die slowly of dehydration. If the water had been allowed to simply run out, eventually the ponies would have noticed, and there would have been a panic. Ponies would probably start hoarding what water they had, and killing each other to obtain water hoarded by others. Some would probably try to leave the stable (if that were possible) and would die of radiation or whatever on the outside. In the end, whatever measures were taken, all paths would end in the death of every single pony in the stable. Killing everyone swiftly and at once was probably the best call here, and a machine could figure this out easily. A flesh and blood pony would have struggled with it and possibly would have chosen a path that, despite their good intentions see what I did there?, would have produced a far more gruesome end for most of these poners than simply getting shot by the turrets.

Let's look at exactly what happened with the water-doodle:

>Shadowhorn called us into a meeting this morning. We nearly had a major disaster yesterday. That idiot Buckbright built his colt a BB gun for his birthday, then brought the kid down to the reactor level for target practice. What was he thinking? Kid missed a radroach and punched a small hole in the environmental system. Actually nicked the water talisman. Thankfully, it’s working fine, but another half an inch and the whole Stable would be in serious trouble.

You will notice that even though it was done unintentionally, the damage done to the water-whatsit was the direct result of bad judgement on the father's part. So basically, this tragedy that the author seems to want to blame on the cold, heartless machine was actually the result of human error pony error, whatever. It was ultimately Buckbright who was responsible for the deaths of everypony in Stable 29, since he was the one who allowed his kid to fire a BB gun in the reactor area. You'll also notice another crucial error made by a pony: the narrator of the journal says that the talisman water-kerfluffle was fine and the damage wasn't serious; it actually turned out to be quite serious. Perhaps if the situation was understood and addressed sooner something could have been done. In any case, the...*sigh*..."maneframe"...in this situation is essentially blameless; it was faced with an impossible decision and made the best choice it could make.

I know I literally just bantzed the crap out of this story for being ridiculous a few posts ago, and in my defense this story is indeed very ridiculous most of the time, but now that I've read the whole section I will grudgingly give the author a few points here. Whatever he may have been trying to do, he wound up creating an interesting ethical dilemma with no good solution.

The irony is that kkack actually touches on something much deeper here than he realizes. His intended message appears to be "good intentions can lead to evil results," but in this case it was a completely unintentional act that led to a deadly no-exit scenario. If anything, it illustrates the ultimate indifference of the universe to man's pony's, whatever intentions in the first place. The tendency of humans and/or ponies is to look at the world like a puzzle, with the assumption that some "right" action is always available that will lead to a perfect outcome, and it's just a matter of figuring out which action is right. In reality, there is no right-action and wrong-action; all actions simply have consequences, and often they are too complex to predict the result. If the author really wants to use this story as a vessel for exploring complex moral issues, he'd be better off abandoning the white-hat vs. black-hat melodrama he's written so far, and delving deeper into questions like this instead.

>>298383
>Janky, homicidal AIs suffering from logic errors show up frequently in all of the games so this sort of scenario isn't out of place in a Fallout story. Fallout 1 establishes that vaults rely on a small but vital component known as a 'water chip' to process their water supplies. And in Fallout 3, the shooting tutorial is framed as your (character's) father taking your ten year old self down to the maintenance level to practice with the BB gun he gives you for your birthday. Broadly speaking, the scenario makes a degree of sense and a tragic story could probably be spun out of it with a little effort.
Several things in this chapter are a bit clearer in light of this information

>>298390
It's also the author yelling "Fuck you!" at the opening of Fallout 3 where you play as a child, your dad gives you a BB gun, and in a maintenance room underground you shoot some targets and shoot one Radroach that somehow conveniently got into the vault and that underground level at the perfect moment. Guess Kkat thought firing a BB gun down there should be dangerous.
The stuff about the water chip was "inspired by" a mix of Fallout 1's "Our water chip is fucked and there is no workaround. Go into the Wasteland solo and get us a new one" main quest and the role played by the player's father in Fallout 3.
In that game your dad left the vault to enter the wasteland and work on Project Purity, a big water purifier that cleanses all the water in the Ptolomac (logically the irradiated riverbed would be unchanged but Bethesda didn't realize riverbeds can be irradiated) and also magically un-irradiate all the water in all of post-apocalyptic Washington DC. oh and the purifier relies on a magic matter reassembling doohickey that'd be put to better use making food from dirt. You get him the doohickey with the help of a giant overpowered GMPC who could have done everything for you.
Guess Kkat thought it would be extra funny and ironic and tragic if your character from Fallout 3 and his dad voiced by Liam Neeson, the life-giving water-bringing heroes, fucked up the vault for everyone and prompted the Robo-Overseer to decide killing everyone quick would be better than any other method of getting or purifying water. It's a shame the vault RepairBots couldn't fix anything.
Doesn't it feel weird for Kkat to spit on Fallout 3's characters and plot when so much of the shit in this story was ripped straight from Fallout 3 and then clumsily shoved into his edgy take on ponyland?
We can't know the robot chose the right option. Any of this vault's ponies could have been the next Littlepip. The vault only needed one good reliable water source. How about groundwater or purified ocean/rainwater? The robot chose the quickest and easiest defeatist option, but would a human (pony, whatever) have tried harder to survive? Would a pony overseer pin all her hopes and dreams on one random character kicked out of the Vault and hope for the best? An AI programmed to minimize suffering might choose mass euthenasia at the earliest opportunity, but is that right? Is that what robots, the children of man (pony, whatever) should aspire to be? Isn't a tiny chance at success better than guaranteed failure? What did mankind or ponykind ever strive for, if there ever comes a day when we all agree with a machine that thinks giving up is better than trying? That "Maneframe" computer should have some ebooks on water talismans and engineering and magic. Why not gather the best unicorns and engineers in the vault and try to replicate another water talisman or summon water from the aether or create a portal to a realm of water or trap a filled water cooler in a time loop so it's always full no matter how much you take from it, or anything else that can be attempted with magic's limitless possibilities? That damn machine didn't even have the decency to construct a fake Ponyville and fill it with brain-scanned knockoffs of the Vault's inhabitants before giving up on life.

>>298392
One more thing...
Isn't it ironic that what Kkat would call masculine behaviour (Teaching your son to shoot) ended up destroying a Stable with "Ruled by a robot" as its gimmick, but a Stable themed around ManDom and Masculinity ruling only failed because some mutant monster cats were created?

>>298177
I dunno, maybe. most of the "Action" happens "off-screen" In the aforementioned scotch tape scene we have scotch acting like a thirsty cunt, Blackjack puts on the perceptitron thingie, accidentally joins her mind for a second
>Oh now i know hes not hurting her
And thats the end of it. Seahorse abstracts it quite a bit and every other sexual encounter is a cut-to-black experiance.

>>298401
Huh, neat.
What writing lessons do you think can be taken from Project Horizons?

Btw was thinking more about the "an evil mastermind or god did it and dies in the end" cliche. Starting to think it's lame now. If everything was part of one villain's machinations, did anyone have free will? Would everything have turned out fine without that villain's involvement? A moral like "geeed is bad" gets thrown in the trash and replaced with "don't get manipulated or mind controlled by a god or asshole or asshole god".
It takes everything that could have been said with the story and everything the heroes could have grown from and throws it away to turn the entire story into the tale of one baddie and the puppet show he was able to put on for himself until he got shot in the dick. Trying to make the final boss the biggest spectacle like that is a cheap writing trick and that's all "I was actually responsible for everything all the other villains did and the creation of those villains" is also cheap spectacle whenever it isn't a clever reveal that was subtly hinted at. In the books I've read so far the best final bosses are more than baddies who do bad because they are bad or told to be bad by the big bad god of evil. Punching out a dark god of darkness with raw firepower is some Kirby/Sonic shit. Not some Fallout or Pony shit. Fallout would have a choice between deep smart dialogue and a firefight and maybe some clever third thing like a self-destruct base button to trigger and run without ever meeting the final boss. And poners would solve the problem with glowy friendship lasers.

>>298491
>Btw was thinking more about the "an evil mastermind or god did it and dies in the end"

I dont think that accurately explains anything. Goldenblood had his dirty mitts on everything but he wasnt responsible for the goddess. You can argue that his interference with Gardens was what led to the Goddess, but it was 100% twilights fault. The enclave and red-eye are almost entirely seperate.

If youre referring to the Eater or his dragon, the eater didnt actively do anything until the very end, and his dragon is basically only confirmed to be responsible for littlehorn.

Goldenblood isnt the final boss, the dragon actually was killed with a speech check by way of the eater, and Tom was the one who killed the eater. Blackjack only got her there.

If the Eater wasnt there, the dragon probably would still have caused littlehorn which was the inciting incident to the war. If the dragon wasnt there, its still reasonable to expect that the war would still escalate to where it ended. If goldenblood wasnt around, One of the more hawkish nobles at the time probably would have made everything go boom faster. Most of the events of KKat's backstory probably still happen.

KKat's equestria has quite a few manipulative monsters

>>298401
>>298491
>>298492
Can we maybe NOT derail this thread into discussing a spinoff that's three times as long as, and no less autistic than, the story already under discussion?

>>298491
>geeed
*greed
Persona 5 did the God Copout and it sucked but saying why would take many off-topic posts.
>>298492
Thank you. Some day I really should read that fic.
>>298493
Sorry, I'll stop.
To try and get this thread back on-track, Calamity and Velvet's shared "I hate that self-righteous elitist prick/impulsive ruffian prick" moment seems like bad writing since they've gotten along great until now. They disagreed over how to handle the Stone Prison Arc since Velvet thought killing because a merc told you to was wrong but aside from that, they got along great. They even started singing cheesy made-up songs together!
Did the author decide he got them too close together too quickly for a proper "will they won't they" romance arc, and use this scene to retcon their relationship status? Perhaps Velvet could secretly resent him but so far Calamity doesn't seem like the type to hold grudges in secret.
This kind of "Fuck this fancy bitch/unfancy bastard" talk probably should have been moved up earlier in the story, before they bond over a shared love of music with some cheesy campfire scene where Calamity whips out a beaten-up acoustic guitar and tells Velvet dad taught him how to play.

>>298005
>>298099
Okay quarter-jew britcuck. I've got hobbies, duties, a family, and a home to take care of. Your only goal in life is literally being retarded while having absolutely zero solvency whatsoever aside from sperging out like a common crackwhore nigger. Also, great job at trying to poison the well since you clearly cannot even BEGIN to realize how many anons hate how fucking stupid you are! You're worse than the average leaf, which is an amazing feat. "M-O-O-N" spells dipshit britnigger.

>>298070
I take it you haven't seen enough of Nigel's rants on this Cambodian equine hoof care site to understand. If not, don't bother. His mere existence is enough to give even the most hardened channer such massive degrees of turbo cancer that the fatality rate is over 100%.

>>298389
The problem here is K "I can't stop sucking dicks long enough to breath" Kunt tried to pull BOTH a giant "Dues Ex Machina" and reverse-write-in a reversal at the same time while pretending that his 'story' was coherent to begin with. Destroying any nuclear reactor with a standard BB rifle is so far beyond a DEM situation that it would be a one in a negligible attempt. Only a complete moron would place sensitive equipmarent in an exposed position. The "ethical dilemma" is not only utterly shoehorned into the story without any TRUE repercussions (aside from the faux-emotional state of those that "experience it") and the fact that another vault is 'lost to the sands'. Oh, so a vault was destroyed because of someone being trained in a location that isn't perfectly secure? Too bad, that's the Wasteland for ya! Oh so that same vault is gonna be annihilated by a defective robot that makes an error which wasn't programmed out/was flawed to begin with? Too bad, that's UNStable-Tec for ya! The entire """tragedy""" is worthless except for being nothing more than shitty animu filler episode material. Pic painfully related in this case.

tl;dr: the only 'moral' that one can even bother taking from this is: don't be a shitty, retarded wannabe-writer like kkunt.

It's okay to not say anything.
>>298500
God fucking damnit. Nearly every single post you've made is off topic. Yes he needs to constrain and limit the words to the utmost pinpoint they could be.
Just post the damn good post detail how it's a damn good post and make the shit work. It's been years, that method isn't working so move on to something that does. You wanted a better poster so suit up.
Both of your actions are well enough laid out yes it's frustrating at times and frankly I've had it. I have nothing to say on the story besides what has already been said. I've already said what I would have said and repeating what I'll said again ad infinitum is redundant.
Sorry I'm a bit short at the moment I'm sure I'll grow out of it soon.
Sometimes not saing anything is better than filling in the companionable silence.
Have a poner everyone.

>>298205
Yes, I will take a look at it.

>>298514
Thanks.

>>298500
Please try harder to focus on the thread topic instead of trying to start a tiresome pissing contest between us. It doesn't help anyone when you insist I'm a part-jew that gives people turbo-cancer or some gaslighting mastermind out to ruin your day or any other delusion. What's next, will you say I breathe fire? I know I'm not perfect, but this is absurd. I know I'm not perfect, but I'm working on that. When I do something that pisses you off, tell me what it is so I know why you're upset and what I could do about it. Simply expressing how upset you are with these tantrums isn't constructive. When you scream and cry at me because you sometimes find me annoying, it is immature and unhelpful. Offense is taken, not given. It's not my job to manage your mood, but if you want me to do so anyway, communicate better.
Anyway, a nuclear reactor wasn't damaged by a BB gun. It's worse.
The child aimed at a RadRoach that somehow got into this "Perfectly-sealed underground location" (Did the first ponies to get into this vault take roaches in with them? Where did the roaches get the radiation they needed to mutate?)
and he missed.
He missed the dog-sized roach on the floor, punching a small hole in "the environmental system", damaging the water talisman.
Are those armour-piercing BBs?
These "Lmao it worked in Fallout 3 so it must work in real life" moments are fucking retarded. Yes, in Fallout 3 a BB Gun is a deadly weapon that can kill an adult in only slightly fewer shots than better guns with better damage numbers. But IRL, BBs aren't going through steel unless something's gone very wrong. Pics related, it's where your dad took you to shoot in Fallout 3. Sorry about the watermarks.

Shortly after saying this crap about the water chip, the text also ruins this Vault's "Everyone here thinks they're relying on Stable-Tec for their orders and thinks they must continue to do so" premise.
>“As head of Maintenance, Shadowhorn laid down a whole new series of safety protocols. They aren’t official until she gets them passed through Stable-Tec, but we’re going to follow them anyway. If Stable-Tec doesn’t like somepony giving the orders for them, well they can trot themselves down here and say differently.”
Despite all this time without a local leader for an Overseer, despite all this time spent obeying a computer they thought was Stable-Tec, they suddenly decide they can make up their own rules and follow them and enforce them without needing the permission of "Stable-Tec" aka the machine guiding them. That makes the prior "There are no safety rules because nopony is in charge down here! If only someone was in charge to tell us to be safe!" part of the chapter really fucking stupid.

Why the fuck would the "Stable-Tec" robot "Maneframe" take so long to guide them that they start to bitch about how long Stable-Tec takes to tell them anything/permit them to do stuff?
Why would the rule of an all-seeing all-knowing AI in charge of this underground facility and its gun-turrets take such a hooves-off approach to managing things?
It's an AI in a book that doesn't understand how AIs work, so it can make decisions faster than people can despite making retarded leaps of logic like "Reducing pony population didn't prevent water starvation. Must continue reducing population until 0 is reached!".
If anything, shouldn't an AI like this micromanage its populace until their yoke starts to chafe?
And what's with the way that maintenance ponies think the water talisman is fine at first, but then the AI decides it's fucked and the water supply's fucked and water-recycling is a myth and the population needs culling, Green New Insanity-style?
Team Littlepip is only here to get that McGuffin they need to save SteelCunt's life, and get the fuck out.
So they should act like they're on a strict time limit.
But instead, they scavenge for supplies and get some health potions, so they can see another hint to the fate of a Stable they have no reason to care about.
Then Littlepip makes drugs so Velvet can think she's a faggot.
And then the door suddenly closes just so the heroes have to go to the door switch, and of course they stop to investigate everything about the Stable along the way, just so Kkat can show off all the "work" he put into this stupid stable and its lore.
He can't just give us a handful of clues and expect us to work it out, maybe coming back to it in another side story. No, he feels the need to walk you through absolutely fucking everything and spell it all out, no matter how many words that wastes.
Everything about this stupid Stable feels like it was hastily written around a desire to piss on Fallout 3 elements and include an evil supercomputer just like the ones in Fallout 3 somewhere, despite the hypocrisy of pissing on the heroes of a game that served as your primary source when writing something this creatively bankrupt.
But Kkat couldn't think of any ways to turn "Stable ruled by an evil AI" and "Stable doomed because of the Water Bois from DC and their taste in makeshift gun range locations" into two distinct and interesting Vaults that failed due to separate lessons the ponies failed to learn in time.
So they're shoved together even though it means neither are compelling.

The lack of leadership, safety restrictions/protocols, and realistic physics meant BBs went through steel and fucked up irreplaceable magitech bullshit.
An AI could either send ponies into the wastes for a new water chip- I mean water talisman or commit die and take its whole stable with it to the sound of DJ Pon3 music.
And now Team Littlepip is only down here in this particular Stable because they need to save the soldier bleeding out on their watch, and they found more than enough healing potion for him plus the McGuffin needed to unarmor him (why didn't LP psychically take Steelcunt down here with them?) but they're acting like they have all the time in the motherfucking world to learn exactly why this little social experiment failed.

>>298547
>Everything about this stupid Stable feels like it was hastily written around a desire to piss on Fallout 3 elements and include an evil supercomputer just like the ones in Fallout 3 somewhere, despite the hypocrisy of pissing on the heroes of a game that served as your primary source when writing something this creatively bankrupt.
On the contrary, I get the impression that Kkat absolutely LOVES Fallout, particularly 3, and wants to cram as many things based on or directly lifted from the game as possible. That's not a recipe for good writing, but it's an understandable goal for an amateur writing a crossover fanfic. The main problem is that Kkat doesn't have a good grasp of how to establish stakes or maintain tension, because he gets his understanding of storytelling from open world RPGs he's sunk dozens/hundreds of hours into rather than books.

This diversion does at least serve to introduce the concept of crusader mane(ugh)frames, which show up again later as part of the main plot.

>>298599
That makes sense. I guess we'll never really know if he considers "And then the heroes from my favourite game semi-indirectly caused the death of everyone they ever knew and loved long before the heroes from my fanfic got here" to be a loving cameo tribute unless he says so. Wee know he's bad with implications because of the Zebra stuff. Not that I have a problem with an author painting african-inspired creatures as 100% evil apart from one obligatory good one who's specifically good because she acts un-african. But it didn't seem like he intentionally wanted to write the Zebras that way.
I wish he did some kind of "Behind the scenes" series of journal posts on Fimfic.net where he describes his writing process, what he was thinking when he wrote this, and what he wanted each chapter to accomplish. That would be hilarious.

>>298602
>I wish he did some kind of "Behind the scenes" series of journal posts on Fimfic.net where he describes his writing process, what he was thinking when he wrote this, and what he wanted each chapter to accomplish.
Kkat has written *extensively* on FoE in his fimfic blog over the years. It's quite a trip.

>>298733
For real? Awesome! Does it spoil upcoming events in the story? Does he organize his thoughts on different chapters, organize his posts by specific topics in the story, or just post whatever he thinks of without organizing any of it?
If he did a "Writer's Commentary" thing where after each chapter he tells people what he was thinking when he wrote this, that would be perfect for a "Review the chapter, and then what he said his goals were when writing it" format.
Reviewers like the Angry Video Game Nerd often ask "What were they thinking?" rhetorically, but this is a great opportunity to see exactly what they were thinking and criticize how he went about attempting what he said he wanted to accomplish with this character, or that chapter, or this faction, or that abrupt dump of a tragic backstory.
Environmental storytelling is about suggesting what might have happened here, not spelling it out for the audience in one of eighty collectable tape recordings/diaries detailing every last detail especially ones that weren't suggested in the environment at all. It's about making people speculate over what could have happened somewhere, and making it a rare treat when we get enough information to definitively figure it all out. Not just putting hugging skeletons in well-travelled and entirely-expected and often even currently-inhabited places that have somehow been undisturbed for 200+ years along with a journal to painstakingly explain everything for BugthEAsderp's target audience. It's about suggesting there's more going on in the world than the player's adventures, not leaving collectible journal pages around that only the player character can pick up or see or hear. People still talk about Lavender Tower and Cinnabar Island. Nobody gives a fuck about the random skeletons in Fallout 3 or 4, and by the time 76 rolled out it featured so many skeletons and Dead Guy Journal holotapes everyone got sick of it.

Also I forgot if I've already said "I hate how Littlepip goes out of her way to learn how random poners died but never tries to take any kind of logical wisdom from it/fulfill their last requests/carry on their legacy" or not, but I still hate it. Littlepip doesn't have an in-character reason to be such a nosy cunt, but she should. It's jarring when LP reads some dead pony's diary because she's never given us or herself or her friends any excuses for it, and her friends never call her out for it so we want to do it ourselves.
She's got no excuse to have such an entirely random knowledge of the pre-war world. Sometimes she doesn't know something she should know, giving characters an excuse to exposit things to her (and us). Sometimes she does know things, but can't mention it until it's time to awkwardly expositionate about it to her friends (who already know) and us.

They could have fixed the "Velvet and Littlepip expositing to us" problem by making Calamity play dumb about the pre-war world to hide the fact that he's a Dashite at first, giving them excuses to fill "him" (us) in.

Maybe my "Littlepip and Velvet should have been raised on hyper-simplistic Pony Propaganda, Calamity should know more than he lets on to add to his mysteriousness and hint at his Dashiteness, and LP should believe learning of what really happened before the war is the best way to make sure whatever killed Equestria never happens again" idea isn't the perfect solution for this problem.
Someone else could probably think of a better solution than that.
Anyway, this problem needs fixing because it makes LP's love of holotapes and diaries (which the author relies on to tell the audience what he did with this canon character and that location and this fallout element and that fanon meme) stupid. "My OC needs to do this because I want her to and gamers did it in Fallout 3" is stupid.
Give your characters reasons to do shit! They can be bad ones! They can be fucking shit reasons! But they need to be good enough to convince your character to do shit, and convince your audience that your character would be convinced by a reason like that.
Although with how hyper-edgy and hyper-bleak this world is written, are there any societal lessons Littlepip could take from the dead that aren't obvious things like "Don't be in a prison full of rapists when nukes fall and society ends" or "If you want to make a slavery-free town, don't make it at the end of a slaver-operated railroad track that leads straight to a slaver city" or "Don't play with a BB gun in an absurdly fragile maintenance room"?

>>298389

Anyway, what I've provided is a rough summation of what happened to Stable 29. This information was obtained from both Scootaloo's message to Shadowcunt, as well as a short subchapter section that follows this message. To be thorough, I'll briefly go after the second subchapter.

After listening to Scoot's recording, Littlepoop goes to investigate the security junction she mentioned:
>There is an access junction between the Security station and the V.I.P. rooms through which you can access the Crusader Maneframe.

She locates the junction. We are not told how she found it or where she found it, only that it was easy to find. This seems a little strange, since one would think that a security override that would allow a pony to take control of the entire stable is the sort of thing that would be well-hidden and well-protected, but at this point I don't think a detail like this matters too much. At present, Littlepoop only knows that the stable's population was killed by the AI acting alone, and that neither StableTec nor any of the ponies ostensibly in charge of this stable are to blame. However, she does not know the full story, and she is curious. Once again, her curiosity about some 200 year old tragedy supersedes her actual mission (which at present happens to be saving Private Cyborg, which I'll once again protest should logically be a time-sensitive goal).

Anyway, she opens the junction box and finds some kind of device inside that allows a PipBuck to connect. From one of the previous recordings, she knows that one of the other ponies was electrocuted attempting to connect to this box:

>Shadowhorn passed away last night from complications after being nearly electrocuted early yesterday morning while trying to access the junction behind a security panel with her PipBuck.
This text is from the recording she found before she found the Scootaloo recording, the one that had her freaking out and kicking at walls. Between this information and what she just learned from Scoot's message, she can reasonably surmise that Shadowtwat was attempting to override the AI, and the AI somehow detected this and killed her. This is a satisfactory answer to my earlier question of why the security override controls weren't implemented. There is, however, a minor logical issue here: if the purpose of the override is to allow a pony to take control of the stable in the event that the AI has gone haywire, it would stand to reason that the AI should be blocked from interfering with this process by design. The override system should be something that the AI is prevented from tampering with; however, this assumes that the system was sensibly designed. It's entirely possible that StableTec is just incompetent.

Anyway, in order to bypass this danger, Littlepoop takes out Velvet's old PipBuck, which she is still carrying around with her for some reason, and jacks into the control panel while levitating it a safe distance away from herself.

>I pulled out Velvet Remedy’s PipBuck for the first time since shortly after I found her. It was a thing of beauty, but I realized it had a less pleasant meaning to her.
I'm not sure why she describes it as a thing of beauty; I don't remember there being anything special about this particular PipBuck. As to what the "less pleasant meaning" it has to Velvet is all about, I have no idea. My guess is that it's tied into her whole "I don't want to be in le cage" deal somehow. In any event, this sentence is vague and awkward; I would either rewrite it or delete it.

Anyway, she jacks into this thing and manages to not get electrocuted. Inside, she finds a log of the AI's actions, and discovers what it did and the reasoning behind it. As I've already explained, the issue was basically that the water-thingy was damaged and was not repairable, and the AI determined that the solution was to gradually cull the population until the water eventually ran out entirely. At that point, it decided to kill everyone.

Nigel has brought up some decent points that contest the logic of this, namely that the water-dealy would need to be both very delicate and basically unprotected in order for a low-velocity projectile like a BB to fatally damage it. The text doesn't go into detail about the reactor level or how things in this area were designed and/or armored, but if it was possible to damage something this important this easily, it seems like another serious design flaw on StableTec's part. There is also the question of how a rad-roach would have made it into the stable in the first place, since the whole point of the structure is that it is supposed to be hermetically sealed so that nothing from the irradiated outside world can get in.

These are both reasonable points, to which I will add an objection of my own: if all of the critical stuff kept in this area is indeed this poorly protected, it seems like it would be a pretty dumb place to practice target shooting in the first place. Buckbright ought to have known this and thus it makes little sense for him to have taken his son down there for that purpose. It would have made far more sense for the kid to have just gone down there on his own without telling anyone, and nicked the water-bippityboop by accident. This actually could have made the situation more plausible, since being a child he wouldn't understand the severity of what he'd done, he'd simply be afraid of getting in trouble, so he would likely have just fled the area and not told anyone about shooting the water-whatchamacalit. Since the AI was entirely in charge, only it would have known about the damage, and it would have handled the situation in its own way, leaving Shadowcack and whoever else to simply guess at why it was killing everypony.

My guess is that kkack simply wanted to emulate the scene in Fallout where the player's father takes him shooting mentioned by another anon, so that is why he chose to do things this way.

>>298846

>After three months, the water talisman failed altogether. The Crusader acted accordingly. To preserve Pony Life.
And with this, the subchapter concludes in a page break.

The next scene opens with Littlepoop drowning her sorrows in liquor:

>I poured what was left of a bottle of apple whiskey down my throat, enjoying the burn. The rage had drained from me, replaced by a numbness that was even worse.
It's unclear where she is in physical space at this point. Is she still by the junction box, which incidentally we don't even know the location of? Is she back in Shadowbutt's room, or maybe Vinyl's? Where did she get the whiskey? Was this just something she was carrying around with her, or did she find it in the stable somewhere? These are all minor questions, but answering them would make it easier for the reader to visualize what's happening.

At this point I'm just assuming it's stupid to ask if she still gives a shit about getting back to Roboponer before he dies. If the actual reason she is exploring this vault in the first place is anywhere near the forefront of her mind, she doesn't mention it in her narrative. Anyway, traumatized by the contents of the recordings she just wasted a fair chunk of time listening to, she now decides to waste even more time by delving into the memory orb she found, which the astute reader will recall is titled "Pinkie Pie's Last Party."

The memory appears to be Vinyl's. LP finds herself looking through the DJ's eyes at the dance floor of a large party. Rainbow Dash is apparently in attendance; she flies up and compliments Vinyl on her choice of beats:

>“Awesome beat, Vinyl Scratch!” she grinned, “Your rhythms always makes for the best parties!”
"Your rhythms always make for the best parties" would be the technically correct way of wording this, although the sentence is still awkwardly worded. I'd probably have her say something like "You always know what music to play," or "The music at your parties is always the best," or "I want to stick my tongue in your butthole."

>And, whoa, was Vinyl Scratch checking her out? She had my gaze going up and down… No, wait, that’s just headbobbing.
Hurr durr lesbian hoerses.

Anyway, another pony, clearly Applejack though her name is only given as AJ, approaches Rainbow Dash. She identifies her by name, and they talk about drinking and drugs sacrebleu! this story is so le dark and so le mature!. AJ is attending the party with a stallion whom Dash identifies as her boyfriend, one Sergeant ‘SteelHooves’ Applesnack. Since this story doesn't seem to have a problem with preposterously implausible coincidences, I'm going to assume this is the same 'SteelHooves' who is currently bleeding to death on a lonely battlefield, while the pony who was supposed to be bringing him medicine is sitting here watching this stupid memory orb.

Vinyl's attention is at this point diverted from AJ and RD's conversation to a nearby balcony, where an argument is going on between a pony that LP recognizes as Pinkie Pie and a second pony whom she does not recognize. The second pony is described as a "purple unicorn," and a few lines later Pinkie addresses her as Twilight. It's not clear what exactly they are fighting about, but Twilight seems to have a problem with Pinkie's behavior. A moment later it becomes clear that Pinkie has developed an addiction to the very same crack-mints that Littlepoop is apparently now addicted to, and Twilight feels that her mint-abuse has gotten out of control. She also implies that it is becoming a wide-spread problem at Pinkie's parties mon dieu! le drugs and le sex and le violence in le pink and pastel pony cartoon! so much le edge!!.

Anyway, Twilight loses her shit on Pinkie Pie and tells her that if she doesn't get her mint problem under control they can't be friends anymore. She storms out of the party, and the memory ends. It is actually a pretty decent scene, but like most of these flashbacks it has no apparent connection to the main story (to the extent that there is one).

>One thought hit me as I collapsed from the memory like I had been kicked in the stomach. (I had, in fact, vomited on myself.)
This is a very, very awkward sentence, but I'm too lazy to go over it in detail. At this point if kkack wants technical help he can pay a professional to wade through this clusterfuck, though I don't envy the poor soul that takes the job.

>Leaning against the wall, I assured myself, “I’m not that bad…”
>“But I have to be careful with you,” I said to the Party-Time Mint-als in my saddlebags. “I can’t let Calamity or Velvet Remedy get to thinking I have a problem with you. I don’t want to lose my friends because they think I’m addicted.”
The author attempts, rather weakly, to connect this disjointed scene to Littlepoop's own supposed drug addiction. Again, I don't disapprove of the addiction as a part of her character, but I do object to the way it's been rather gracelessly tacked on. We have not seen her use these mints more than a couple of times, hardly enough to constitute serious abuse, and her "addiction" has barely factored into the story. Also, while I actually thought the memory orb scene was decently written, it is unfortunately just another random event from the past that has little bearing on the present.

Pinkie and Twilight are complete strangers to LP, and she has no real reason to be emotionally affected by any of this. Moreover, this scene shifts the focus rather abruptly from the tragedy that occurred in Stable 29 to the issue of LP's supposed drug addiction, and her investigation of the Stable 29 incident is itself a diversion from her primary objective of helping Roboponer. Far from adding depth and emotional resonance to the story, these layered subplots feel like the author is bouncing around randomly from idea to idea, like a kid with ADD aggressively flipping through channels instead of just finding something to watch and watching it.

>>298850

Anyway, that was the end of Chapter Fourteen.

Chapter Fifteen: Whispers in the Darkness

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“Psst! Pinkie Pie, are you asleep yet?”
This quote, evidently, was spoken by Pinkie Pie's rapacious Uncle Jeff, who would periodically sneak into her bedroom on the farm and shove entire pineapples up her plot-hole, and long story short that's why she developed a mint-abuse problem later in life. Actually I'm just kidding; as is the norm with these epitaphs, I don't have the slightest fucking idea who spoke this line or what the context is.

Anyway, the chapter opens with another of Littlepoop's dream sequences. She's having nightmares about all the fucked-up shit she's learned about the wasteland during the unspecified amount of time she's spent here (at this point I'm estimating about 3 weeks). The details of the dream aren't particularly important and mostly deal with events we already know about.

As I've complained many times before, the disconnected episodes from the past that LP keeps digging into have very little to do with the events of the present. Though they seem like they would be compelling enough stories on their own, there has been absolutely nothing done to connect any of these events to the main story involving Littlepoop and her friends. What makes all of this even worse is that there (still) is no main story; since she left the stable, LP has done nothing but wander around getting into random fights with random bad guys, without any hint of a larger overarching plot.

What makes all of this so vexing is that the author, as far as I can tell, is far more interested in writing about the history of the war that led to the apocalypse than he is in writing about anything going on in the post-apocalypse present he chose to set the story in. Moreover, most of these episodes from the past seem like they would be considerably more interesting to read about than the present story, which is painfully dull. Littlepoop is not a particularly interesting or likable protagonist, and she doesn't really do much besides wander around collecting junk and picking fights with random enemies. Her friends are not particularly well thought out characters and there is little interesting chemistry between any of them; it's not even clear why the three of them are friends. None of them have any tangible goals or objectives, so the story has nowhere to go. As I've complained before, the author seems to want to use Littlepoop's explorations of the present, ruined world as a framing device to reveal what happened in the past, but as I've also complained before, she has no obvious reason to even want to dig up the past, so this story just feels like a bunch of disconnected anecdotes that hint at a considerably more interesting story than the one we're actually reading.

The episode we just witnessed in the memory orb, for example, was actually a pretty well developed scene. We see several of the canon MLP characters at a much later stage in life, and while they appear to be partying and having a good time, it's clear that everything is not well. Pinkie Pie's exuberant personality seems to have led her to a life of constant pleasure-seeking, which has led to addiction. Her problem has gotten bad enough that it is affecting her friendships; there is also an implication that the availability of drugs in Equestria is becoming a broader social problem, and that Ponk is somehow responsible. Twilight Sparkle, one of her best and oldest friends, has just given her an ultimatum to either get her shit together or they're finished.

Not only is this a good scene, there's a lot of material here for a compelling character arc. Pinkie is a character who loves fun and parties and good times; addiction is often born from chasing a continuous dopamine rush, and chemicals that produce this affect artificially would plausibly be attractive to her. It's easy to see how she could become addicted to something like cocaine-mints. If I had to place a bet on which which mane 6 character would be most likely to have an addictive personality, Ponk would be my choice.

Now compare this to Littlepoop's supposed "addiction" to the same substance: basically, we have a pony with no prior history suggesting she might have addictive tendencies, who just tries the mints one day and then suddenly gets addicted to them. Is it plausible? Sure; if a substance is addictive enough nearly anyone could get hooked. But from a literary perspective, it's not interesting.

With Pinkie Pie, the author has explored some possible dark sides to her established character. You could easily do this with any of the mane 6, btw; the trick is to simply take the traits they are known for and push them towards extremes that turn them negative. Twilight's smarty-pants bookishness and obsessive organization could turn her into a tyrannical bureaucrat a la Barack Obama or Angela Merkel. Rarity's vanity and desire for popularity could turn her into a shallow social climber; her obsession with her fashion enterprise could turn her into a workaholic. You could pretty much go down the list and do this with all of them.

The mane 6 are examples of well-built characters: they each have their strengths and weaknesses, and you can easily pull their arcs in a positive or negative direction depending on what you emphasize. The series itself focuses on developing their strengths or at least what the later writing staff interpreted as their strengths, but with a story like this, where the tone is darker, it would make sense to focus on and draw out their weaknesses.

Unfortunately, kkat's OCs haven't been developed in this way, so there is nowhere to take them. So, we get this meandering bullshit about a bunch of random boring characters who become friends by default for no reason other than convenience, and then wander around the wasteland for 500,000 excruciating words, looting and killing because reasons.

>>298852

Anyway, I got a little sidetracked there. Continuing with the actual story.

The chapter opens with Littlepoop having a bad dream, and then she suddenly wakes up. Once again, we have absolutely no idea where she is or how much time has passed since the end of the previous chapter. This is the information we are given:

>I was laying… somewhere. A bed. But every time I tried to remember exactly where I was, or how I got there, the memories slipped away. I opened my eyes. The room was dark, but light poured in through a cracked-open door. I didn’t recognize the walls with their shadowed posters or the roof with its still and silent turret.
Maybe Pinkie's uncle slipped her a roofie.

Anyway, it's clear that there's something wrong with her, but it's impossible to say what. She was drinking whiskey the last time we saw her, so it's possible she got drunk and blacked out, and had to be carried...somewhere. It could also be the comedown from the crack mints, I guess. It could be any number of things, really, since we have absolutely no sense of time or space here. For all I know, six years have passed since the end of Chapter Fourteen, the party lives in Saddle Arabia now, and Littlepoop caught pony AIDS from being gang-raped by a bunch of raiders on motorcycles.

These are her symptoms:
>My body felt wrong. I ached, I felt horribly weak. I had chills when I wasn’t sweating profusely. My stomach churned. My mouth tasted strange and mushy.

Meanwhile, Velvet and Calamity are talking outside, and LP overhears some of their conversation. They mostly seem to be discussing her the way they would a sick child, which LP takes as something of a blow to her self esteem.

>My stomach convulsed violently. I wanted to cry. My eyelids were too heavy to look around anymore, and I didn’t fight them as they closed on their own. I turned away from the slice of light coming through the door, falling again into fitful sleep.
This ends the subchapter.

I have to say, when I read the first few paragraphs of this chapter, I had to go back and make sure I was actually on the right chapter. It legitimately feels like we just skipped a huge chunk of the story here. I know this author is into these weird time-skips, but this seems like a major skip even by his standards. Absolutely nothing from the previous chapter has been resolved; we have no idea how (or even if) they made it out of Stable 29, we don't know whether Roboponer got his medicine or died or what, we don't even know why Littlepoop was unconscious or what's wrong with her or how she came to be in this state.

It would be one thing if the chapter had ended with Littlepoop getting clonked on the head or blacking out from booze or injected with some kind of mystery serum or something; waking up in a strange location after a time skip would be appropriate in one of those situations. However, the chapter just ended with her thinking to herself that she needed to keep her drug use in check so her friends don't treat her as an addict. The chapter had gone completely off the rails by the time it ended, but that doesn't mean the author can just abandon the story where it's at and pick up at some random point in the future; you need to at least make an attempt to resolve things before ending a storyline and moving on to a new one.

Their location right now is a complete mystery. Since I haven't been told otherwise, I would assume they are still somewhere in Stable 29, but that doesn't feel right somehow. They could be on the moon for all I know. Let's take another look at the description the author gives us of LP's immediate surroundings:

>The room was dark, but light poured in through a cracked-open door. I didn’t recognize the walls with their shadowed posters or the roof with its still and silent turret.
"Walls with shadowed posters" could describe any number of locations in this story, but I'm particularly confused about this part:
>the roof with its still and silent turret.
The roof? How the hell can she see the roof? She's in a dark room, which would imply either that there are no windows, or that it's night outside. The last place we saw her in was underground, so strictly speaking there shouldn't even be a roof. Did the author mean to say "the ceiling?" But that doesn't make sense either; why the hell would there be a turret on the ceiling? I have no idea what the fuck is even going on anymore.

Oh well, let's keep reading and maybe we'll figure it out. Together we can solve the puzzle.

When the next subchapter opens things are unfortunately not any clearer. LP is still in some kind of mental fog, and we learn from Velvet that she has a fever. Calamity and Velvet seem to be deepening their romantic bond over their mutual concern for LP, which is actually pretty funny. I'll give the author 20 points if he has them fuck on top of her unconscious body.

Anyway, they banter back and forth for a bit, but nothing of any serious importance is discussed. Calamity tries to convince Velvet that she needs to start wearing armor. She is vehemently opposed to wearing raider or slaver armor, but Calamity informs her that, believe it or not, there are other types of armor and they can probably buy some when they get to Tenpony. Why they are going to Tenpony or when it was decided that they were going there has never been mentioned to my recollection.

As long as I'm complaining, I'd like to point out that this scene is yet another example of how absurd medicine is in this story. Littlepoop has some inexplicable fever that seems to have downed her for the time being, yet all it took to heal the mortal wounds that she and Velvet sustained during their fight earlier was a few swallows of magic potion. Does that shit just not work on ordinary illnesses? In all the years of developing all-powerful healing potions and crack mints and all the other weird shit they have in this world, it never occurred to any of the Equestrian scientists to cook up something like Tylenol?

>>298846
Bit curious to but with the radroach how did it actually mutate into that so soon. Sure got magic and all but the water purifier breaking seems to have happened only a few weeks after the stable was sealed since it was that 3 month anniversary party when the population was killed. Seems like damn near the moment the bombs dropped immeditly every endemic creature mutated into giant hostile monsters. Makes some more sense in Fallout 3 since it's 2 centuries after the war so plenty of time for things to mutate and could assume the vaults would have some stuff break allowing them to scurry inside.

>>298846
Considering all the absurd combat advantages given to Littlepip by her PipBuck, Velvet's a retard for not wanting to wear it.
If LP and Velvet travel together, and the Overmare for their old Stable can track Velvet's pipbuck, the Overmare knows where Velvet is.
Velvet's all "I don't want to wear that thing, it's a shackle! It reminds me of my time in the Stable!" but that's retarded.
This thing saves Littlepip's life constantly.
Kkat knows if Velvet also wore one of these, she'd have the same enemy radar and the same HUD/Eyes-Forward Sparkle. She'd instantly become the same SATS-target-assisted instant-badass Littlepip is, perhaps an even better one, because Littlepip's combat prowess is 69% Pipbuck, 30% overpowered gear she conveniently has, and 1% retarded moments of "Creative thinking" that only work because the author's dumb enough to decide hiding yourself with a cumstained sheet makes you invisible and not a single Alicorn ever encountered or heard of a memory orb, not even their leader.
Littlepip should want Velvet to wear her Pipbuck. She faced the goddamn Wasteland to bring it to her!
Calamity should want Velvet to wear her Pipbuck, because SATS can bail you out of any combat situation that goes bad and practically carry you through them.
Velvet in a Pipbuck would steal Littlepip's thunder. Hard to pretend wearing something special on your wrist means your protagonist's a "Veteran badass Wasteland master" when anypony else could wear their own copy of the damn thing to get the same overpowered bonuses.
The Pipbuck, its automatic map, and the way it puts markers on your map and in your HUD for you to follow... That was briefly and cleverly mocked in Fallout NV's Dead Money DLC, where a big blue fecker named God says your pipbuck and easy-to-follow quest objective markers makes you a dog on a leash. Or something like that.
But it's a leash that binds you to your current objective. And you hold your leash's handle when you decide which quests you complete and how, and which quests you ignore.
Velvet has no excuse to be so pretentious and virtue-signally over not wearing such a blatantly overpowered god-watch.

>AI's action log
A convenient log that spells out everything wrong the robot ever did? Sweet. Bet the ponies of this vault wish they saw this sooner. Bet any nice ponies at Stable-Tec, if they exist, wish they stopped this robot upon seeing that log.

>Applesnack
This name is so stupid it's like something canon Sweetie Belle or maybe Scootaloo would come up with after trying to think of an apple pony name for DND night.
There are websites out there that list EVERY TYPE OF APPLE EVER! I know, because I looked at one when trying to figure out how I could subtly give my character a name that's an incredibly subtle reference to his actual identity as a cowboy apple pony, but also something he'd choose to name himself given the chance. I didn't even know Star Apples existed until the day I saw that site. Silver stars bring sherrifs to mind, and silvery-white stars in the sky, so the name Silver Star blends in over in Canterlot while sticking out if you know what to look for. Fuck Kkat for doing absolutely no research on apples and their silly names and the creative things you can do with pony names.
Doing something dumb/lazy and then making your characters snark about it is the laziest and gayest joke possible. If your own subconscious telld you this is uncreative and dumb, why go through with it anyway?

>Steelhooves keeps bleeding, keeps keeps bleeding and uh
LP's lifted heavier shit, she should have psychically picked him up like another gun and carried him through the dungeon. Or dragged him behind them, if too tired for that. It'd mean dragging him closer to the health potion/Suit Unlocking Spell Matrix they're after. And if they leave him outside, there's always a chance some Raider/Bandit/Slaver or non-union criminal without the uniform or training might decide to finish him off and take whatever goods can be found in his steel-coated pockets.

>"Pinkie, your crack addiction is tearing this family apart!"
why are fandoms so unfunny? Why do they repeat the same simple jokes until they drive them into the ground?
"Hahaha Italy likes tomatoes"
"Hahaha Akechi likes pancakes"
"Hahaha Deadpool likes chimichangas"
"Hahaha Jeremiah Gottswald likes oranges"
"Hahaha Celestia likes cake and Twilight loves books"
"Hahaha Sonic likes chili dogs"
Then when those stop amusing the fandom they get taken further but not in a funny way.
"Sonic only eats chili dogs and all the framed photographs in his house are of him with chili dogs"
"Celestia wants to fuck cake"
"Pinkie does crack and Twilight is legally married to a book"

>Velvet should wear armour
Yeah, and her fucking Pipbuck.

>>298862
Good point.

>>298852
Oh I think I know the origins of that quote! Not sure what the context is for the story but I think that was from the episode when they first visit Appleossa and are on the train ride at night with the girls unable to fall asleep. Can't remember the full context but AJ had that giant apple tree with them in the car which I recall was making the others uncomfortable.