The names of these radio stations…

The names were just obnoxiously self-absorbed. 'Exquisite Tunes for Dignified Intellectuals', 'The Thinking Hour', 'Classical Tunes for the Cultured Genius', and names even worse than that assaulted his eyes and sensibilities. When your regular income of rations wasn't tied to how many thousands of ponies you could get to regularly tune into your radio station over the hundreds of other radio stations in the Vault, it seemed modesty and self-awareness went out the window and came back as changed concepts. Modesty because a weapon, a virtue you could immodestly signal about supposedly having for the purposes of boasting and self-aggrandization when you could say you had more of it than your equally boastful competitors, and self-awareness mutated and devolved after injecting multiple doses of irony and sarcasm directly into its veins, descending from the baseline, the fundamental basic thing that separated Pony from Animal, to some sad parody of itself that knew it was a failure, but felt giggling at its own failure made its lack of effort charming. It didn't exactly take long for the title of the "Most self-aware" radio station for rich ponies became a fake title, and the pursuit of that title became as hollow and meaningless as an attempt to try and be seen as the "Most dignified" radio station.

Out of all of these radio stations, his favourite one had to be 'Regal Tunes for the Enlightened Mind', and it simply played centuries-old music on loop, with the radio host only deigning to pause his playlist for ten minutes every hour as he reminded his audience what radio station they were listening to, and then proceeded to give a very snooty, spin-doctored version of current events in the Vault. His pre-recorded messages would repeat perfectly on schedule, if they were not changed ahead of time and updated with current events.

Sure, this station was one of the stations under his control, and he had a few of his own classical-style piano compositions in this radio's playlist just so he could say he had done so, if he ever felt like telling anypony. And sure, he still made sure that the radio host, or the 'Narrator' as he called himself, gave events a subtly and inconsistently pro-Dark Stars spin.

While the narrator couldn't outright condemn Stable Security and fully support the Dark Stars without alienating most in the audience he was meant to slowly win over across a long period of time, and permanently alienating almost all of the ponies he hadn't already won over, he could take an overwhelmingly smug and negative tone to pretty much anything corrupt, abusive, or incompetent done by Stable Security, anything wasteful or stupid done by the 'Elites' who weren't too popular or powerful to criticize without getting fined, arrested, or even killed, and best of all… He could give not-so-subtly-sarcastic overwhelming praise to the current Overmare and her policies. After all, the Vault had anti-defamation laws that were used exclusively to make it illegal to criticize high-up ponies and accuse them of carrying out any sort of crime, but good luck wording a ban on sarcasm that couldn't be circumvented.

Sure, many of the ponies up here didn't care if the ponies beneath them starved or died or found themselves forced into a food shortage so severe they had to kill each other and take each other's rations to amass a proper meal, but they did fear the threat of rebellion from below and a coup from the military. After all, such horrible, ghastly events happening, or even both events happening at once or in a sequence, one after the other, might temporarily disrupt or even permanently end their ability to laze about in the lap of luxury while ponies beneath them worked in their name, and wouldn't that just be simply dreadful?

They might even be forced to work for a living. Oh, the horror! The horror!

At the same time, the narrator could put on a pleasantly-surprised tone whenever he was talking about something big the Dark Stars did, and take an excessively negative tone when it came to describing anything carried out by any other gangs or organizations.

Continuing to scroll, Sunrise Stardust eventually chose the relatively simply-named Diamond Spectrum Raindio, and halfway through a bar, some harpsichord song was playing some kind of fugue.

Not bad, Sunrise supposed. This fugue had plenty of notes, he supposed, and they were played quite well. He was still learning the ins and outs of proper music terminology, but he'd rate this Fugue a "Decently Fugue-y" seven out of ten.

He still thought his own music was better.

On the fourth floor down, his elevator stopped, and the door opened into an impressively-decorated floor, even by the standards of the 'Elite'. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, blooming flower bushes with impossibly prismatic rainbow flowers had been placed on the corner of each corridor, and a deep royal purple and wonderfully fluffy shag carpet filled the cold, sterile metal ground of this Vault's floor. And every door, Sunrise noticed, had many Cutie Mark-esque symbols on it, to tell everypony which marked ponies lived where.

Sunrise didn't need those door-symbols, as his mind had long since gotten used to remembering the paths you took perfectly to keep your bearings and find what you were looking for in a Vault where most rooms, most floors, and most walls and ceilings looked exactly the same. But still, it certainly looked nice.

The fugue was his companion as he walked through the eerily silent vault floor. But he knew exactly where to go and why he was going there, so nothing could scare him off. Besides, he was at least ten years too old to be scared by things like silence.

At the end of a corridor, he rounded a right corner and headed down another corridor for two blocks, and then he turned again, and made his way to the right…

A mare intersected his path! A mare five years older than him walked past, a beautiful honey-gold shade of yellow offset nicely by her snow-white evening gown, whose marvellous curls of ocean-blue hair in her mane, and especially her wonderfully massive tail, threatened to take hold of his vision for life. And that ass... It was covered, but still, that ass! That ass looked like you could bounce a water bottle off it, and have the water bottle land perfectly on its base. His girlfriend and/or wife had her beat in every department, he decided, except for the ass. If every mare had an ass that great, he'd understand why some degenerates enjoyed anal sex.

She stopped, offended by his wandering gaze, and he quickly sobered up and regained his wits, taking stock of the situation.

Curses! If he was caught checking a mare out this high up, and she was the type to scream "Waaaah, heeeeelp meeee! I'm being attaaaaaaacked! This is literally sexual haraaaaaaaaaaaaaaassmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeent!", he could be executed without trial. And if she was the type to run away and tell everypony who'd listen that he was checking her out, it would be counted as a Scandal, a code word for "Another fucking stupid and incredibly minor event that only somepony as retarded and pointless and starved for excitement as a Crème would care about", and he'd have to kiss his right to officially marry his wife one day or ever even see her again goodbye, if he wasn't just executed on the spot for the hell of it.

"Honey Lemon?" Sunrise asked, pointing a hoof at her. "Is that you?"

"No," She flatly clarified, and pouted, her opinion of him visibly dropping by the moment. Funny how her opinion of him seemed to drop visibly when he went from potential monster who dared commit the crime of checking out a hot mare, to a simple idiot who thought she was somepony she wasn't.

"Oh, my mistake," He shrugged, turning around and continuing to walk on, following his own path.

She gave a long-suffering and overly dramatized version of a simple roll of her eyes, amplifying the gesture as if she believed if she overacted hard enough, she could will ponies into existence to look at her and admire her for putting up with such an awful social interaction that somehow hurt her precious feelings and inconvenienced her so, granting her the social capital, the pity points, she so desperately craved and felt entitled to.

'Crisis averted!', Sunrise smugly thought to himself. 'Damn, I'm fucking smart!'

Still, considering what little he'd seen of her behaviour, he changed his mind regarding that mare, and mentally shifted the image of her in his memories out of the "Fantasize about fucking her with my lover's permission and approval when my lover is busy during her dry spells" folder and over to the "Fantasize about bitches like this one getting humilitated, humbled, broken in, and absolutely fucking FUCKED by degenerate mafiosos and their degenerate thugs in a degenerate manner before I swoop in and save her" folder.

Walking, walking, walking. Sunrise's path shouldn't feel this long, he felt. After all, he was only going to see-

Some other mare crossed his path. His age, with a milk-white coat of fur, a singularly-coloured white tail like the tail of an arctic fox, ears an inch longer than a normal mare's ears would be, and her mane was a faint pale blue so incredibly soft and light that it was almost white, but not quite. The saturation of her mane's colour was high, but its lightness was even higher. Her eyes were a deep indigo, and she was walking around in a striking black ballgown outlined with gold and enhanced with golden highlights. Instead of a proper Pip-Buck 7000, she had the screen of a Pip-Buck mounted upon a pair of titanium rods that circled her left forehoof like a bracelet. This was the Pip-Buck 7000 Lite, the durable plexiglass screen of a dismantled Pip-Buck 7000 that had been backed and bordered by beautifully shining titanium, and it had all of the technology and functionality of a modern-era Pip-Buck magically infused into the metal-backed glass with the power of some strange ritual Sunrise had no idea how to replicate. If he did know the spell that transferred the chosen properties of one or more things into another thing of his choice, he was pretty sure he'd use it to try and make his customized Stable Suit tougher than a thousand suits of Power Armour.

Her name was Arctic Wind.

"Arc," Sunrise nodded respectfully with a charming smile, and she turned to look at him. Only then did she notice him, and who he was.

She stopped.

"Sunrise, my darling!" The mare greeted loudly and in an overblown manner, leaning forwards for a second twice, kissing the air on either side of his face each time, her lips loudly "Mwah"ing over a foot away from his actual cheek each time as the confused Sunrise simply watched her. "When is your next performance?"

"In two days," He grinned, "So make sure you come prepared, and in your best Dark Stars clothes. It's going to be the greatest show we've ever had!"

Her breath caught in her throat and her heart almost stopped. "That's in two days?"

He remained patient and friendly with her. "Didn't anypony tell you? We're going to have the performance to end all performances. Make sure you wear your best clothes, and buy all the merch you can, because I don't think anything we do is ever going to top this. Not for a month or two, at least."

Horror dawned on her face, as the double meanings of his word choice and phrasing sank in. Oh gods… That was happening THIS MONTH, in just TWO DAYS?

"Of course!" She insisted, turning around and running back to her home. "I simply have to finish some last-minute adjustments to my outfit," He insisted over her shoulder, and ran faster.

He hoped she'd be alright. His upcoming show would certainly be one to die for. It would also be one to make others die for.

He walked on, away from her, and turned to the right. At his next left, he ignored it and walked straight ahead. At the left after that, he turned left and carried on to his destination, knowing it was a straight shot from there, with no additional twists or turns.

Nope, no twists or turns at all. Just ignored intersection… after ignored intersection… after two more ignored intersections, he felt the urge to turn, and the necessary willpower to resist the natural urge to turn somehow increased with each step, until he shook his head and shrugged off the mental effect, focusing himself on getting to his destination.

Finally, Sunrise made it to a particular door with just three symbols on it. On the top left, there was an ordinary brown-handled brown-haired paintbrush, tipped with a bright emerald. On the top right, there was a bright pink flower he didn't recognize, but it was a huge one with a bulging center, and a hole in the center of that center.

Above those two symbols, a batallion of over two hundred far smaller symbols in seven rows took up a small amount of space on the top of the door, like stars in the sky. He was pretty sure those smaller symbols were the Cutie Marks of this family's dead grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles, cousins, and so on and so forth.

Below the armada and below both of the two main symbols, centered between them and equidistant from one another, there was the head of a pink-haired paintbrush tipped with a pale white pink, emerging almost like a strawberry from a long, thin plant stem with a single leaf on its left side, near the base.

He pressed a button on the metal blast door's right that swhooshed it on up, metal mechanisms jump-starting pneumatic machinery on the blast doors into life, though a more traditional and outdated wooden door had been installed just behind it, on its own cute little doorframe and everything. A marvellous mahogany door, with four panels carved into it like the panes of one of those pre-war glass windows with plusses on them. Pointless raised swirly bits swirled around the outermost border of the mahogany door, and the long door handle on the door's right was made entirely of solid gold, though the internal mechanism was likely some other, tougher metal.

Just as he'd read about characters doing in the pre-war era, Sunrise Stardust raised his right forehoof and gave it four firm taps in a row, the knocking sound of hoof on wood echoing and strange to his ears.

He focused, and concentrated on his speech, his breathing, and all other aspects of how he presented himself.

"Who is it?", the clipped and snooty tones of an irritated rich mare in her late fourties who deemed the whole world beneath her asked.

"Hello, it's Sunrise Stardust, the overmare's fiancé," He spoke in a focused and polite manner, using the Prancian term 'Fiancé' to please her. That word meant 'The male a female is engaged to, and will soon marry' over in Prance, before the war. Not to be confused with Fiancée, which meant the female a male was engaged to. Or was it the other way around? He couldn't quite remember. Strange how he didn't remember that, but the myriad and arcane rules of the Vault's Pip-Buck games and card games stayed fresh in his mind.

Come to think of it… Well, considering what happened to Equestria, who knew what happened to smaller countries like Prance? "Is Evergreen Sage here on this fine morning?" Sunrise asked.

"Certainly!", The fourty-something mare declared, and there was some whispering Sunrise understood quite easily. "Go," She whispered to her daughter. "Go and get him!"

Sunrise smirked. It was cute that the old hag had hated him, until he gained the affection of the Overmare's daughter. This caused her to switch her beliefs around in a hilariously instantaneous manner, and begin encouraging her only daughter to try and take Sunrise's attention away from the Overmare's daughter and towards the daughter of some high-class painter. The hag claimed she believed Sunrise's ascent from nopony to new Elite simply 'HAD' to mean he was some sort of secret long-forgotten heir to some fortune, or an incredibly powerful chosen one of some sort with an impressive destiny that included becoming some sort of incredible creature far beyond the ordinary pony

Why on earth, Sunrise wondered, would he ever give up the love of his life for the sake of some painter? Sure, he didn't hate the mare, but she didn't offer him more than his current mare. She didn't even offer him as much as his current mare. And in this high-class world of manipulations, lies, and pointless societal games, was what a pony could do for you not all that mattered?

Sunrise suspected that the old mare didn't really believe any of those lies, and simply wanted her daughter to go for Sunrise because it might cause a scandal that would ruin his reputation up here, and might threaten or even break up his relationship with his lover. And if he was cast down back to the lower levels for that, his chance at bettering his Vault and the world above gone for good, the ponies down there that loved the rich upper-level ponies loathing him would be the least of his concerns.

"Thank you, Mother," The refined and Canterlot-accented voice of a mare Sunrise's age 'Politely' (With just enough restrained anger to be audible only to those used to hearing those tones and sensing the anger, while sounding presentable to others, even though there would only really be a point in using that voice when enough, perhaps even most ponies around you could sense the anger) as she walked to the door, clicked some lock open, and opened the door.

Before Sunrise's eyes stood a remarkably beautiful Unicorn mare, with a remarkably unusual hairstyle for a level this high up. Her body was a softer green than the body of his girlfriend, and her body was thinner, with a slightly pointed and toned arse with not a single pinch of fat to be seen there. Her arse bore the lower Cutie Mark he'd seen on the wall, the paintbrush flower thing with a plant stem. Her eyes were a bright pink. Her mane and tail had the same pink colour. Her tail was long and thin, tapered to a point as it nearly touched the ground behind her, and her mane… The hair on the back of her head had been combed up to join the hair atop her head, which had an array of curved spikes pointing straight upwards, almost like the petals of a flower. One spike near the front of her horn noticeably stretched down a bit towards her right eye before spiking back up. All in all, that haircut was probably a pain to maintain and keep straight, but it certainly made her stand out on a floor where most mares had long, elegant curls, or long straight hair curled with curlers into curls.

The green mare smiled upon seeing him, and put on a small, fake gasp of pleased rich-pony surprise for the benefit of her mother. "Ah, Sunrise!" The green mare, Evergreen Sage, declared.

"Shall we walk and talk?" Sunrise seductively offered, extending his right forehoof to her.

"We shall!", She agreed heartily, taking it for support and trusting him fully to not flip her or drop her hoof as she walked out of the open door frame on three legs, left the wooden door open, and closed the big metal blast door behind her.

She didn't hear her mother scream about closing the damn wooden door, and she didn't care to hear it, either. She took her hoof away and sighed, and Sunrise let his raised hoof fall to the ground. They walked together, but not too together. A few steps apart from each other's sides, and Evergreen Sage walked quicker to get a few steps ahead, so that nopony would think the two ponies were really together.

They knew where they were going, and why. They ducked into the doorframe of a room with a gold-filled purple circle painted onto it, rather than any actual Cutie Mark, and she slammed her hoof into the door's open button like she was trying to break it.

They both stepped into a communal area that would be hauntingly empty, if it wasn't full of splendour and needless opulence. Two blast doors on either side of the communal room couldn't be changed, but their interiors had a dark midnight-blue coat of paint. Striking ocean blue shag carpeting, large and decadent purple plush sofas and hoofchairs here and there, a two glass tables with fancy curvy twisted legs and a spiral on the end of each leg, and a fission battery-powered coffee maker and seven mugs resting on each table, and a row of many mahogany cupboards had been built into the furthest wall, over a long and continuous inch-thick chunk of marble mounted on the wall using a triangular steel frame with heavy screws. It was like those kitchen tables you used for food preparation, for ponies who thought regular tables were too mainstream. A mahogany Snooker table with a green fabric game board, or whatever you called the green bit of the snooker table, had been set up with two pool sticks and a whole triangle full of pool balls. Each of the fifteen balls came in a set of two, those sets bore the same colour between them, and each set was a different colour. Sunrise had absolutely no fucking idea how you really played Snooker, but he noticed a white ball near the triangle, and from the power of observation, he had learned that you had to jab the ball with the stick like its tip was the tip of a jousting lance to knock the coloured balls into the ball-sized pockets with attached nets here and there around the field. Each colour of ball was worth a different number of points, but fuck if he knew which ball was worth how many points.

"By the fucking Godesses!" Evergreen Sage declared as soon as the blast door was down, leaping over to a sofa and collapsing onto it in exhaustion. "Does that hag ever stop her whining?"

"Probably not," Sunrise noncommittally shrugged in a way mares up here tended to go wild for as he pretended to listen, again, in a way mares up here tended to go wild for, as he made his way to the coffee maker. Sure, normally, he'd be all smiles or all concerned and caring looks, but he knew this mare well enough to know that she preferred to just rage for a while at the start of the conversation, venting her frustrations before she was properly ready to talk about them or pretty much anything else. He fucked around with the coffee maker's stand's touch screen and settings in a manner he didn't understand, pressing buttons he didn't recognize labelled with foreign-ese words from pre-war Prance he didn't understand, in an order he'd copied from some other pony he'd seen use one of these machines a few years ago. He knew how these machines worked on the inside, he knew how to take them apart and strip them, he knew what to sell for the highest prices, and he knew the modified medium-quality low-output Vault-made Water Talismans these things used to create a near-infinite coffee supply could net one hell of a high price if you knew where to sell them and who to sell them to. But while he'd absorbed some random pieces of coffee-related trivia over the years, and he'd even swiped one of these machines and hidden it somewhere in one of his room's magical storage seals, which only he could access and operate with the aid of his own Pip-Buck, he still knew jack shit about coffee, how to make it, how to brew it, and how to properly operate one of these stupid fucking machines. These fuckers didn't just use a foreign language on their buttons and screens, they were also programmed in a coding language that was entirely foreign to him, so that one time he tried scanning the shit's stupid-ass coding with his Pip-Buck and trying to hack it didn't work out. It didn't end in disaster, he was just unable to hack it. So he saved a copy of the foreign program, planning on examining and reverse-engineering it later, potentially with the aid of somepony who understood this language, but he never actually got around to doing that.

"It's just so, so, so so so, so stupid!" Evergreen shouted, working herself up into a right old frenzy, so she could properly vent.

The coffee took ten seconds to brew, thanks to magic, and when he was done, he poured perfectly black coffee into two perfectly clean white mugs. And then he used his Pip-Buck to drop a thirty six gallon ceramic beer barrel sculpture that worked perfectly well as an actual beer barrel, and he poured the rest of the machine's coffee into that barrel, just fucking tipping it over and dunking the shit right in there. When he was done, he put the coffee maker back on its stand and repeated the procedure, getting more of that sweet, sweet 100% Saint Bright Spark coffee into his coffee barrel. The stuff was wonderful, with a wonderfully fragrant caramel flavour that carried a lovely hint of citrus. A magically-reconstituted copy of a famous, rare, and delicious pre-war coffee made with Saint Bright Spark coffee beans, and the method for making it had been invented by the great Saint Bright Spark himself, the greatest Prancian emperor of all time and one of the finest military generals the pre-war world had ever seen. He'd discovered the beans on some tiny island he conquered, in the middle of some ocean near the west coast of Zebrica, way before the war and during the early days of Equestria's founding and halfway through the period between Saint Bright Spark's coup and officially-recognized crowning of himself as Emperor, while Prance was frantically trying to conquer territory at random in an attempt to match the unquestionable dominance of Brittaneigha. He couldn't quite remember the dates and figures of that part of history, but later on in the timeline of the world, yet still before the war that ended in Megaspells, the costs of getting boats out to and from this island and getting ponies to farm the beans on the island were high, but very much worth it, as rich ponies would be willing to pay upwards of seven hundred bits for a single pound of these beans.

"She's trying to use me like I'm some low-born whore who lives to be used up and thrown away!" A pony Sunrise was currently ignoring yelled.

The coffee was complete, and Sunrise poured it straight into his big ceramic beer barrel, quickly emptying the coffee maker and repeating the process that refilled the machine with the drink he wanted.

Evergreen sighed in an overblown and overdramatic attempt at sounding long-suffering and exhausted. "Really?" She asked.

"Of course," Sunrise answered. "Coffee's good got energy, and mages need energy."

It also sold like hot cakes laced with banned drugs on the black market, because what greater luxury for a low-level Vault Pony who'd worked hard and saved his rations and water tokens up could there be than to drink Coffee? That stuff was a barely-addictive drug that gave you a pleasurable rush of energy while dehydrating you, forcing you to drink more water, which was practically a better form of currency than actual water tokens on Vaults where most ponies instantly exchanged their water tokens for water anyway. It was also a lifesaver when you were up late at night, trying to stay awake and energized as you slaved away on some project, wishing the Overmare would institute some kind of six-hour or eight-hour work day limit system where one job could be done for twenty four hours a day by four or even three ponies at different times during the day, meaning nopony had to suffer through a ten-hour work day followed by another six hours of "Optional and voluntary" unpaid Overtime you'd lose your job if you said no to.

This coffee maker still amused Sunrise, in a way. Sure, the magic and technology to recreate this coffee stuff and its fancy bean brews cheaply and efficiently had existed back then, for about ten or twenty years before the war, but the fancy ponies of that era had believed themselves too fancy to drink anything some horn could make in great quantities, rather than something nature and fancy soil made slower. Meanwhile, those who wanted to sell great quantities of magical copies of the fancy stuff on the cheap to less financially-dominant clientele found themselves struggling to make ends meet in that market, as who would want to buy a little taste of what rich ponies drank every day when their local coffee-making pony could brew stuff that's just inherently better using any old ingredients, by virtue of simply having a Cutie Mark of coffee or something related to coffee?

"At all hours of the day, she bitches about this and that, whining that I'm not the kind of daughter she wanted. Well, Mother, I'm sorry to break it to you, but perhaps, if you wanted one of your foals to play the part in that quaint play you've dreamed up for how your life should go, you should have had more foals! Perhaps one of us would feel like indulging your pathetic, mindless fantasies!"

Anyway, now it was the rich pony who happily owned a coffee maker, it was the vault that had communal coffee makers in "Rec Rooms", recreational rooms anypony could activate for their own choice of drinks, and it was the rich pony who didn't really need or want these for anything other than another way to buy a fancy drink and show off what wasteful and absurdly fancy drinks they could get out of the machine and slowly sip.

"The Highborn have decided to have as few foals as possible, to preserve the prestige and exclusivity of their little subculture. And that's all it can be, now that they're so outnumbered by the Lowborn! We are where we are because we're the best of the best, the crème de la crème, or the descendants of those who were Crèmes. We should spend our spare time breeding to make more Crèmes, not simply mating for pleasure."

Sunrise didn't look up from his coffee as he poured it into his barrel. "It's because the current generation of adults make this generation's newborns look mature," He said, surprising her.

"Oh?" She asked with a coy smile. "Do tell."

"Before the war… Well, religion fell out of fashion centuries ago, but we'd always had Princesses Celestia and Luna. Those among us genetically or psychologically predisposed to fanaticism and idolatry, and those who need divine guidance and the instruction of a higher power to live their lives well, simply shifted their focus from an imaginary God or set of Gods with their own ideals and commandments to the living demigoddess Princess Celestia and her set of ideals and laws. Divine decrees became unquestionable laws. Holiness became Harmoniousness. And then the war came, a problem she wasn't prepared to deal with came with it. A problem so far out of left field, her usual problem-solving methods didn't work. A problem friendship and friendly magic couldn't solve. And then she had her heart broken by Zebrakind, shattering her image as a benevolent and merciful, yet still invincible and unquestionable diety in the flesh, the ultimate legal and moral authority. And then it was Princess Luna, somepony who tried her best to be a tougher version of her sister despite having failure in her past and a thousand years less experience, while the world fell apart around her. Her Ministry plan gave ponies the ability to choose their favourite Ministry, but it didn't fill the void left by the lack of strong centralized leadership that represented a strong, kind, thriving society and the rules that created it. And now, in this Vault… Well, if you want something or somepony to believe in, your choices are the current Overmare, her wishy-washy cutie of a daughter whose heart is too soft to lead as anything other than a figurehead, ancient and dead dreams from dead ponies in books about what the pre-war world was supposedly like, a local hero, some radio host, nothing but your own whims and wants, or myself and The Dark Stars."

"I know which one I've put my faith in," She muttered.

"And that's the issue. Faith, in oneself and one's purpose. We're Ponies, Evergreen Sage, and we need a purpose in life, that's why our magic forms marks and brands on our rears to tell us what our role in society is. But this society… Well, what role do we have in it, besides making clothes for the upper one percent, making food for the upper one percent, and making machines for the upper one percent, and making things for each other when we're done with that? What role do we have in it, if we're too low-down and poor to get a job in one of those roles? What are you meant to do with your life when society has no use for you and no place for you as anything other than another mouth to chew food and consume manufactured goods? No wonder so many turn to simple pleasures, to distract themselves from this. What's the point of life?"

She answered with hard eyes and conviction in her heart. "Because we're here to clean up the mess upstairs and make Equestria beautiful again,"

"True," He confirmed with pride in his little Dark Star, glad that she'd taken his sermons- I mean radio speeches to heart. "Life exists to give itself a purpose and choose its own path, and that's the purpose life has chosen, fixing mistakes. Life's inherent desire to fix mistakes is why evolution exists in any capacity. But a lot of ponies don't like that. They don't like the idea of leaving behind a world where nothing has purpose to help create and maintain a world where you're responsible for yourself, your family, and your effect on society. They don't like the idea of leaving behind a society where you're a number and a rank to join a society where you have a role and your contributions to society in that role matter. There's no purpose to anything about a life lived without purpose, and meaninglessness can be a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that you don't have to worry if you're doing something wrong or bad or stupid, because nothing you do, good or bad, will matter to you, but the curse is that nothing you will feel like it matters. And that hollowness, that hopelessness, it eats at ponies. We weren't meant to live that way, as cogs in a big machine ruled by an incompetent and selfish cunt-"

Evergreen Sage gasped.

"Fuck penis," Sunrise articulated eloquently, as though reading a poem. "Testes penis fuck. Dick suck boner, rape penis fuck. Whore cunt penis, penis nutsack, penis."

And this time, they noticed, she didn't gasp at the mention of the word 'Cunt'.

Sunrise went back to the coffee machine, and brewed some more coffee. She was silent as he began to pour it into his barrel.

Sunrise began to speak over the sound of pouring liquid. "…Some incompetent overmare who'll do anything to hold onto her power. But the ponies who notice that hollowness growing inside of them and starting to hurt them, they notice that the ponies who talk about it tend to become depressed, suicidal losers who are no fun at parties. So when dumb ponies start to see what's wrong, they pretend they're too stupid to see what's wrong. After all, their shallow lives ensured that they never developed the emotional and intellectual depth necessary to understand their situation or their own feelings on the matter, or why they feel the way they do. They continue on in their shallow imitations of pre-war life, desperate for a semblance of normality and the ability to pretend to be perfectly fine, and perfectly normal. When they aren't instead pretending to be the bestest little pony in the whole wide world, of course. They're actors in a play reading lines they didn't write, playing the roles they think they were given, and cannot change. That's why it angers them when others deviate from what they think life's script is."

"That's my Mother, then," Evergreen Sage said sadly. "Another actress in this grand play."

"One of those pre-war sluts who got the job by lifting her tail," Sunrise smirked.

Shock and horror were clear upon her face, as she gaped wide, as if she was trying to fit three dicks in her mouth. The introspective mood had been ruined. "You vile fiend!" She laughed.

He smirked. There was a reason she and so many others liked him. Well, there were many reasons. He was an honestly, genuinely kind person, for one thing, and he always knew the right thing to say. It took quite a bit of service before he was willing to trust you with anything big, and this mare had served him well over the years as his link to the world of high-class Agricultural Management. The company her mother's marriage ensured she would inherit owned many, many floors in the Vault known as A "Anyway, how goes your garden?"

She smiled. "If anypony asks, terrible, and it's the water rationing system's fault."

"That's the way," Sunrise said with clear approval. He sat down on one of the nice-ass chairs to face Evergreen Sage, and his horn lit up with a gleaming golden light as it continued to remake coffee and pour it into his beer barrel. "How much BS do we have?"

BS… A brilliant code phrase, truly. After all, as most expect it to mean BullShit, something not formed or crafted, but simply excreted carelessly by a lowly animal only good for its ability to impregnate useful cattle, who would ever suspect that it could ever mean anything else?

In this instance, it referred to Black Flowers and Sander Roots. BS: Black Sander. The two ingredients vital for brewing a simple and powerful healing potion, the standard recipe used by old pre-war Stimpak factories.

Now, you might be wondering what Stimpaks are. Well, before the war, there was this one political movement of cheats and scoundrels, thieves who'll lie to your face and the faces of your children while picking your pocket and trying to shut down factories, especially weapon factories, to try and weaken Equesrtria.

The Watermelons.

…What are you giving me that look for? You know it, I know it, everypony knows it. Watermelons are evil little bastards, and trusting them is a mistake.

You know, fucking Watermelons. Lying, cheating, greedy little watermelons who hate our society, our culture, and the prosperity it gave us. As if success is not a part of nature as natural as failure, but a crime we commit against the world whenever we succeed at something. You know what I'm saying, right? Fucking watermelons. Green on the outside, red on the inside. Watermelons, the slur given to these groups after their façade started to falter, and ponies started to catch on to the lies.

There was this myth called The Finite Mana theory, before the war started, but it really picked up traction and mainstream acceptance during the war. These liars, and the crazy ponies who believed them, swore that all the magic in the world had to come from somewhere, some kind of source, some finite supply. These liars swore that when the magic ran out and dried up, the whole world would be destroyed. Ponies would drop dead, Pegasi would fall from the skies, weather would act of its own volition and turn against us, and our pets would attack their owners, returning to their natural, feral, wild state.

They rallied against the use of magic in food production, house construction, weather management, and more. They wanted Ponykind to stop using magic altogether, and they wanted to ban a pony's right to teach another pony magic.

Scientists fought these lies for a long time, but they had infiltrated much of academia, and they were difficult to remove. They made those who believed the earth was flat and Australia wasn't real look reasonable, moral, and open to honest debate and discussion. When you showed them evidence that they were wrong, they called you a science-denier and a monster. When you debunked their lies, they called you a shill for Big Factoria, their nickname for the big companies with big factories who supposedly also have massive buildings of actors taught to say convincing "Lies" that disagree with "Their Truth".

Finally, Princess Celestia put a bounty on the idea. Any pony who could prove these lies were truthful before the end of the year would gain ten thousand bits, but if it couldn't be done, the lie was officially a lie. Any pony who could find a unique way to prove these lunatics wrong would get a thousand bits as compensation.

And then, suddenly, everypony was a scientist. Everypony had their own presentations, their own speeches, their own books to reference and scientific discoveries to reveal, even if they had already been in books for decades. After all, Celestia didn't say they had to find and present new or unique information, only that the information had to be presented in a unique way. Songs were written, picture books with simplistic words and big pictures were crafted, cakes were baked with scientific facts written on them in icing, massive musical numbers with legions of ponies singing and dancing took to the streets to sing about the wonders of the digestive system and how burned calories fuelled a Unicorn's magical reserves, parades with floats bearing big Papier-mâché textbooks open to an important page

Meanwhile, those who believed in Finite Magic Orthodoxy were unable to prove anything. They could only cite information their friends and forefathers in this field of lies had been fed by their forefathers, who had been fed lies by their forefathers, who had been fed lies by a cabal of professional liars with a talent for seeming far more intelligent than they are, and attracting gullible people who desperately want to be seen as intelligent.

When this nonsense was finally debunked, those fucking Watermelons changed their tune in an instant and pretended to believe this new lie had been what they were really saying and believing all along. They changed their "Magic could destroy the world!" propaganda, but not its overall tune and end goal.

The myth of "Global Innervation" was born. The belief that when a Unicorn consciously chooses to charge magic to his horn and cast a spell, or a Pegasus unconsciously sends magic to his wings to fly, and his hooves to walk on clouds and push them around, and an Earth Pony unconsciously wraps his body's internal musculature in magic to strengthen and reinforce it, or radiates magic to the crops he grows to strengthen them and force them to grow bigger, faster, and healthier, magic is created from burned calories and the soul's energy, and then it's just… Left there, in the world, rather than being infused into something with a purpose given to it by Ponykind. The belief that magic is not a natural state of matter, such as liquid or gas, or a psionic energy psychically created by a Pony's highly-evolved brain and controlled by a pony's magnificently complex nervous system, or a foreign and malleable energy-based form of transformative matter from an array of other dimensions and worlds that leak into this one, or a strange and variable mixture of the three that will never be fully understood, only increasingly understood over time, but instead…

This is the belief that magic is a deadly and uncontrollable force that remains world after each invocation of magic and use of magic. The belief that magic can build up in the world over time, choking its 'Natural Mystical Energies' or some such nonsense. The belief that when the world has "Too much" magic in it, the world will be destroyed and shattered apart if we're lucky, and if we're unlucky, our foals will become hideous mutants malformed by magic for whom life is eternal suffering, each successive generation of ponies becoming worse off as the exposure to "Too much" magic continues to damage their bodies like some sort of inherently-radioactive energy.

It was nonsense. Complete nonsense, but this time, the cabal of lunatics and liars who believed and peddled this nonsense had learned a lesson. Not THEIR lesson, the lesson intended for them, but "A" lesson. The lesson that honestly and openly going up against Princess Celestia's ponykind ends in failure and disaster that will be great fun for them, and a nightmare for you.

So they teamed up with a bunch of other cults that followed other long-dead evil lies used to sieze power, and a bunch of agents from Zebrica hell-bent on Equestria's downfall. And together, they decided that all of Equine society is inherently evil and phallocentric, the fancy term for penis-obsessed, and patriarchal, the fancy term for male-dominated. Yes, the Anti-Equestrian Coalition decided that because Equestria is ruled by two all-powerful and benevolent female dictators, while most local leaders such as Mayors and Sherrifs are either male or female depending on who in the general vicinity is the most qualified to lead, the whole world simply must be dominated thouroughly by males. And what of the many, many females in positions of power? They decided the females in power only try to get and use their power for the good of all… To impress men.

That little Anti-Equestrian Coalition also decided that science and logic are evil things the evil ponies with minds corrupted by magic's sweet siren song use to dupe others into buying into their lies. Yes, they literally decided Science and Logic, Reason, Evidence, and other foundations of rationality and rational scientific examination of the world around us, are evil things to be ignored, forgotten, and shunned.

Why more ponies back then weren't able to see through this charade, I'll never know.

They even decided that virtues like Kindness, Loyalty, Honesty, Laughter, Generousity, and other uniquely equine values are evil things! Yes, just because Kindness CAN be shown to evil beings and wasted upon them, Loyalty CAN be shown to the wrong side, and Honesty CAN hurt the feelings of your best friends and lead you to give information to your enemies best kept hidden from them, Generousity CAN lead you to give up your only blanket so another pony won't go cold, an act seen as a bad thing by selfish beings following a selfish ideology, and Laughter…

Well, you need a high IQ to understand why what ponies call 'Laughter' can be considered a virtue, and that's one of the many things their soulless cabal of villains lacked. So they simply decided Laughter is a silly dumb silly stupid silly thing for silly ponies only. They decided they were too smart, too smug, and too enlightened for things that were simply 'Funny', not when a book could instead obnoxiously smile and wink at the audience until the Postmodernists in the audience had smugly chuckled enough between sips of their stupid shitty sprinkly foam-coated pink soy-bean soy-milk coffee.

In any case, they all came to the conclusion that because Equine society wouldn't "Do the right thing" by bending over backwards for them, their entitled asses, their selfish greed, their short-sighted policies, and their crazy beliefs, and their inability to be mature, Equine society was evil and had to fall, so the Zebras could take over and do what all of their insane allies demanded at the same time.

Yep. That'd happen. The Zebras certainly wouldn't ever turn on the Useful Idiots after aiding them in the destruction of one of the few societies willing to hear their insanity out and even enable their insanity. Nooooope, not at all! Certainly not. …He said sarcastically.

And so, the idiots who believed in Magic Innervation became another "Activist Organization", one of the many loud, lying voices screaming in Princess Celestia's ears that she wasn't smart enough, wasn't fast enough enough, wasn't kind enough, wasn't tough enough, wasn't good enough, and just wasn't enough. And another "Activist Organization" dedicated to standing in the way of Equestria and its interests. This one stood in the way of education, Equestria's magic-reliant infrastructure, the release of new technology, the building of new schools, and so on. Many historians believe these lunatics were the ones who leaked the location of Littlehorn to the Zebras, enabling their armed military assault on the civilian school and their slaughter of the underaged foal students and unguarded teachers present.

They protested around factories, blocked city streets, lied to foals about how magic work… Pinkie Pie had her hooves full un-ponying these criminals, let me tell you. Experts believe they were a big part of what forced her shift from making parties and bakeries in sad low-income areas to having those who opposed Equestria and wanted to create more of these areas kidnapped and violently 'Disappeared'.

Anyway, The Stimpak was something Twilight Sparkle invented with Applejack serving as a consultant. She made this to try and placate these lunatics, back before they'd gotten too crazy, and had pushed Pinkie too far by rioting in one of the shitty areas of one city she was trying to help. Long story. Equestria's war with the Zebras was a long, long story.

You know what Healing Potions are, right? Nice little glass vials of a magical potion that heals the user when imbibed. Either a cork stopper to keep the liquid from spilling out, or the glass vial's top ends in a long, thin tube of glass that ends in a round end, meaning you have to smash that top bit off if you want what's inside it. The liquid is stereotypically a bright red, due to most common Healing Potion recipes seen in most books, like the Beginner's Guide To Alchemy, favouring the recipes that give the liquid its signature apple-red colour. However, other colours of healing potion can exist, depending on the recipe you use. Sunrise wasn't sure how potions worked, but he'd memorized three potion recipes: The one for making healing potions, the one for making general all-purpose magical antivenom, and the one for making glue.

Speaking of Alchemy… There's Equestrian Science, where we test stuff. We figure stuff out. We blow stuff up. When we find a lethally poisonous element, we figure out how much of it is necessary to kill a pony by creating an unthinking and unfeeling magical simulacrum of a pony out of magic and some nearby element. We're naturally appreciative of the beauty in the world, and to truly appreciate something's beauty, you need to understand something fully. So we're curious. We're not as bad as the Cats, but we're pretty bad.

We're bad dudes. We invented guns and Megaspells. Don't fuck with ponykind!

…Oh, my sides. That concept still amuses me to no end. I didn't write down my laughter just now, but I laughed a lot upon reading that. Does anypony else find it odd that it's the species with the most capacity for love and kindness that invented tool after tool after tool designed to change the world around them for the better? We've got ploughs for the farms, picks for the mines, guns for the Griffons, and Megaspells for the Zebras.

Where other members of another species might look at a big red button with "Warning: If This Is Pressed, The World Ends" painted onto it and stay away from it, we'd press it to see what happens, on the off chance that we'd spend 22 minutes going on an amazing adventure and learning some incredible and important life lessons that make us better ponies. We've got curiosity, and we've got it bad.

Then again, why call it bad when it's worked out so well for us? We invented lights, lighters, guns, and so much more. We invented pretty much everything, ever. We invented so much, there was this one crazy ahistorical history-related conspiracy theory that claimed we were all actually a biologically-engineered super-species made by a biologically-inferior species that evolved its way from crap to greatness, made us, and then died because it had nothing else left to do or invent, and we made our amazing technomagical breakthroughs over the years because we had a head-start in the form of leftover "Relics" from ancient non-pony civilizations.

Sure, ancient long-dead pony civilizations exist, and have neat relics made with forgotten technology. But a non-pony species? That's crazy talk. Only something with as head as big as a pony could ever figure out science, or magic, or logic, or civilization, or anything else.

Now, long ago, Equestrian Science was called Alchemy. We tried to convert lead and copper to gold through chemical reactions. We dumped random shit into cauldrons and noted the effects in pre-war Pip-Bucks called notebooks. (Sunrise's Note: I'm being sarcastic there, I know what a notebook is!) Where Pegasi typically wanted to make better weather factories and Unicorns typically wanted to make better spells, Earth Ponies that weren't satisfied with a life spent farming or raising chickens took to the field of Alchemy to figure out how to make what we called "Potions", but were really more like powders and soups. Powders and soups made with ingredients that contained Chemicals known as Active Ingredients.

You know how there used to be a certain plant out there in the world, and I've forgotten its name, but if you chewed on it, you would feel less pain for a while? Well, that's because the plant contained an Active Ingredient, a special chemical that naturally grew in special plants like those, like how apples grow on trees and ores and gemstones grow in mines. Perhaps the chemical would have a name like Aspirin, for example. If you crushed up a lot of those plants and magically extracted the special Active Ingredient chemical from the plants, you'd eventually get so much of the chemical, you'd be able to solidify it into tablet form. Or, if you wanted it in powder form, you could make a small capsule (somehow) called a pill and put the powder inside that, to make it easier for ponies to swallow the pills and get all of the special chemical or powder into their stomachs.

Anyway, it was through Alchemy that ponies discovered the world, how to reshape metals, how to turn stuff into other stuff, and so on.

And then, we met Zebras. Zebras, and their Zebra Alchemy, where putting dog poo, some dirt, and a few drops of your own blood into a cauldron full of water while stirring it counter-clockwise eight times followed by three clockwise stirs on the full moon while bouncing around the cauldron on one leg and chanting "Omgo bongo, omgo bongo, mmm-belly go mon dodongo!" over and over will somehow eventually turn the mixture into a bright blue liquid that turns you invisible or makes your cock and balls triple in size when drank.

Zebra alchemy sucks ass, and everypony hated it. So we let them have the term alchemy, and we started calling what we did "Science". Alchemists became Scientists, and Master Alchemists became Doctors and Professors.

Zebra alchemy was like an insult to everything pony alchemists had scientifically discovered. Where we noted our findings, they left their own bullshit a mystery for everypony for the sake of greed and egotism. Where we made life easier on our fellow scientists, they actively sabotaged the discoveries and experiments of others to prevent them from making certain experimental and powerful potions first. Where we spent our existence evolving stronger magic and more control over it, along with a strict system of morals and a deep understanding of ourselves, nature, the world, and our places in it, their magic was wild, nonsensical, and uncontrollable at the best of times.

Where we were ponies, cheerful and merry and kind to a fault, they were like big, impatient, stupid foals that never grew up, and never stopped living solely for their own selfish needs, wants, and desires.

Where we did real pony science, they pretended to do science, and their stupid zebra magic made up the difference.

Where we'd make a smoothie out of a bunch of fruits by blending them together with one of those awesome machines that use spinning blades in a big glass container, they'd boil their fruits in a cauldron until they got a bright green potion that allowed you to fly. And if another Zebra did the same, but their Not-Cutie Mark was different, they'd get a different potion out of the same recipe. And if the recipe was changed in any way, if the Zebra did one too many stirs in one direction, the potion would explode, or turn into acid that would melt the cauldron into useless slag, or turn red and become a potion that makes anypony who drinks it see dicks everywhere for a few hours.

Sometimes, it almost makes sense. It makes sense for a bat wing to be added to a "Give the drinker bat wings, flight, and pointy fangs" potion. It makes sense for an acorn to be added to a "Transform the user's outermost layer of skin into incredibly tough tree bark" potion. But the other ingredients in the potion, like the blood of pigs, the hooves of a goat, some cat shit, and a strand of hair from a pony who was angry when you got the hair, they just don't make any sense at all. Some Zebra Alchemy potion recipes even call for some random item that could be anything, as long as it has deep sentimental value to you.

It's insane. It's stupid. Nopony understands how it works. Well, except for one pony, and I'm not it.

Seriously, fuck Zebras! Did you know that the Zebra language lacks terms like "Very big", "Colossal", "Massive"? If they want to tell you about a fucking big tree, they'll tell you they found a "Big tree". They have no terms for getting those sorts of concepts across. You either want something now, or you don't want it at all. You either have lots of something, one of something, or none of something.

Now, back to the story.

Stimpaks are fucking cool.

The Stimpak, short for Stimulation Delivery Package, was designed to be the fully non-magical answer to the Healing Potion. The petals, the head, the flesh of the stem, the roots, and the liquid inside the stem of the Black Flower, when combined with a few of the unique and stupidly long-named chemicals found within the Sander Root's turnip-like flesh, make for something great to spike traditional Intravenous Fluid with, when those plant parts are dissolved and mixed into a Saline Solution, a mixture of salt and water.

As for what a Stimpak looks like… Well, it's harder to describe than a simple glass bottle or metal flask filled with a red liquid. A Stimpak is a modified hypodermic needle made of metal, with a sharp and sturdy pointed spike for a needle that gets wider the closer to the fluid-carrier it gets. Instead of the usual head of a Hypodermic Needle, something Sunrise honestly believed was called 'The Hyperdermic Button' because you pressed it like a Pip-Buck's button when you injected the pointy end into the body to inject the fluid into the body, there was a metal hexagonal bolt at the end. This was connected to a horizontal strip of metal, kind of making the Pip-Buck resemble a T. Like jet engines on experimental planes, a little metal nub stuck out of each of the strip of metal's far ends, and from the metal strip's center, a little cylinder of metal emerged. Atop that cylinder was a cylindrical glass-covered pressure gauge that faced the user, a thin plastic arrow-like spike inside the glass to point to the green 40% on the right, the central yellow 20%, or the red 40% on the left. Two thin yellow plastic tubes emerged from the sides of this pressure gauge to connect to the Stimpak's horizontal metal strip's far-away nubs.

They're sturdy. Shockingly sturdy. You probably couldn't break one of these things if you tried. Early models of these things were made out of simple glass and plastic, with metal needles, but by the time they started mass-production using factory-farmed ingredients, they were designed to be tough. Tough enough for combat, and so simple to use, a shot-up Earth Pony pony dying of blood loss, with just one hoof remaining, could still operate these things well enough to get him back into the action or to safety. They don't magically and instantly regrow lost limbs, but they do help heal limb damage shockingly quickly. They certainly shat all over the cumbersome and tricky-to-use Magical Bandages soldiers had to do with during the war, before Stimpaks were mass-produced.

This thing doesn't have any buttons. This thing doesn't have any pretentiousness. This thing doesn't have any fucks to give, either. You stab it into someone, and the device will somehow sense that you've stabbed it into somepony. It'll jizz out its healing juices, and it'll heal that pony. You can stab it into the legs, the shoulders, the back, anywhere. Except the spine. For the love of fuck, do NOT go for the spine with this thing. Best case scenario, the fluid heals the spinal cord damage you just did. Worst case scenario, it'll take a few more Stimpaks to heal that damage.

Stimpaks… They're not magical, and they don't use Zebra Alchemy or Earth Pony Science in their construction or designs, but with how incredibly powerful they are, you'd be forgiven for assuming that they were made with Alicorn jizz and the tears of the moon itself and other magical crap all along. They made basic healing spells look like nothing in comparison. Though stronger healing spells still left them in the dust, you couldn't stock up on thirty healing spells before a big fight.

There's a common urban myth that says one day, a blind Pegasus stabbed herself in the eyes with two Stimpaks at the same time, and when she pulled them out, her vision restored itself. That's probably bullshit.

It's possible to rig your Pip-Buck so it'll automatically inject you with the Stimpak fluid when your health lowers below a certain threshold, but at this point in time, I wasn't entirely sure how to do that and I wasn't about to waste Stimpaks trying to figure it all out through trial and error.

Sunrise wanted to know how many Black Flowers and Sander Roots she, her farms, and her farmers had been able to produce on the sly, without tipping off anypony who'd happily expose her or her farmers for farming something other than the oats they were meant to farm. I know, I know, it would truly be the scandal of the century, the most shocking thing to ever get reported to Stable Security for.

However, it would certainly suck ass if Evergreen Sage or one of her workers got reported and arrested for doing it. If Evergreen herself was caught as the one who organized this, she'd get an opportunity to defend herself in a court of law. Well, a court with the Overmare serving as a Judge, a band of backstabbing politicians eager to take her family out serving as the Jury, and Stable Security thugs hoping they'd be ready to serve as the Executioner. If one of her workers or middle-management staff found himself or herself blamed for all of this, well, that pony wouldn't be as lucky as her. Suffering the threat of Execution, followed by being given a "Do this little highly-illegal favour for me or my troops, or die" order, would be the best case scenario for that pony.

Sunrise decided he'd try to keep that in mind as he prepared himself to hear a low, low number.

And then, he felt… Something. Something odd, something strange, some kind of strange little sensation that wasn't something you touched, smelled, tasted, heard, or saw. His Sixth Sense for the use and manipulation of magic, something uncommon but not unheard of in Unicorns with considerable magical power, wasn't what detected this sensation. It was something strange his seventh sense picked up, something he'd never told anypony about. The strange, indescribable sense that detected luck, and allowed him to sense lucky occurrences and the inherent luck of things in a way the skin might sense heat or cold.

He felt… Lucky.

Really lucky.

And his expectations for what was to come rose. He hadn't felt Lucky like that for a good few weeks, which meant the universe must have spent this time cooking up something good for him.

"We've been able to produce between three hundred and four hundred hundred pounds of BS per floor, per month," Evergreen Sage explained, "Seventeen floors, sixteen months, one oh eight, eight hundred… We've farmed one hundred and eight thousand and eight hundred pounds of Black Flowers and Sander Roots, combined, from the floors under my control. In addition, we've 'Lost' around four thousand, five hundred additional pounds of Razorwheat, over the last sixteen months or so, and I do hope we find them soon."

That surprised Sunrise for multiple reasons. "I thought you only had eight floors."

"I did, and then one of my rivals in the Oat production business got caught with two colts half my age in her sheets, so she was shot. Her floors were divided up between the remaining agricultural families, and as you're aware, my family is an agricultural family."

"Understandable," Sunrise nodded. She'd already told him the real story behind that sudden change there a few years back: Some farming baron tried to rape her mother twenty years ago, her mother killed him in self-defense, his previous victims came out of the closet to help her get away with it and forge a letter stating that he was leaving all of his property to the rape victims. And then half of the victims killed the others, motivated by greed, and then they turned on each other. Evergreen Sage's families was the only survivor, and when Evergreen was born, she grew up watching her parents try to organize farming operations they knew nothing of. A few years of intense study later, she'd learned her stuff and taken over the operation. Before long, she'd grown into the actual owner of those Agricultural Floors and the farms that spread out to engulf them. Vertical farms, hydroponic farms, all managed by Earth Ponies. The food grown here was fed sunlight by a combination of light from the weak and temporary fake suns made by a revolutionary and experimental new technique invented by Unicorns and Pegasi working together, and the semi-magical artificial solar lighting made by Earth Pony/Unicorn Technology. Then, the homeless "Serf" slave ponies lucky enough to not get jobs farming in the dirt would begin packing farmed vegetables into big wooden boxes, to be transported by Earth Pony or Pegasus to the designated Magic Zone, where the many Unicorns who knew the necessary spell would magically increase the farmed fruit, vegetables, and grain in size so that they could be sent down to the Processing Floors.

Processing Floors were like Factory Floors, but there were fewer of them, and instead of a whole floor getting taken over by forges, assembly lines, recycling plants, and any other things you'd expect to see in a factory district, the whole floor was dedicated to assembly lines that took magically-engorged fruits and vegetables and chopped them up. There were also assembly lines that took grains, especially the magically-enhanced genetically-enhanced plant known as Razorwheat, and turned them into cereals somehow. The magically size-boosted fruits were what he was interested in, and he loved watching as colossal fruits bigger than three ponies standing atop each other were reduced to massive piles of regular-sized fruit chunks, which went into tins made from recycled metal, which were then shipped to the Supply Core's food supply, to be distributed around the Vault unevenly and unfairly. He didn't think he'd ever get tired of watching the finesse, the style, the sheer artistry of those Unicorn Fruit Butchers on the assembly line as they swung their multiple massive blades with their horns and magical might, usually around three to ten depending on the butcher. With their incredible skill, they sliced fruits precisely, evenly, and finely, and in their incredible boredom, they added blade-twirls and pointless flourishes and guard poses to the dances they were forced to go through, day after day.

Regular shipments of raw food would also be sent to the Kitchen Floors, where ponies lived to cook, slice, dice, fry, flambé, and more. Those fancy meals made by chefs would be sent up to the rich ponies, who sent money and orders down in nice little envelopes that very rarely got lost along the way.

Overall, the Vault's mechanisms for growing and distributing food was strangely beautiful, Sunrise thought. He doubted robots could do it much better. After all, they were better suited to the jobs magic didn't make you any better at, like the "Put fruit chunks and fruit juice in tins" stage of the process.

Sunrise felt lucky again, which surprised him. He couldn't quite remember the last time he'd felt himself feeling lucky again so quickly after his luck spiked upwards.

"And then one of my rivals in Carrot production was found dead on a floor far below here. He'd been stabbed and robbed on the way to the Tech-Sec, and his killer wasn't found. So his lands were, once again, divided between us. And this pony had a lot of land, so I came into ownership of quite a few new floors."

"Excellent," Sunrise smiled.

And then he felt lucky again. Which was starting to make him feel curious, and a tad nervous, though he didn't show it. What in the world did fate have in store for him today?

"And then somepony I hadn't even considered a rival made the foolish mistake of marrying Viper Widow."

"Who?" Sunrise checked, just to be sure.

"Forest Frenzy," She explained. "Short, stumpy little rich stallion in his late fifties, going through enough of a mid-life crisis to marry a murderer in her early fourties."

"No, Viper, who is she?"

"I haven't told you about that bitch yet?" She asked, surprised.

"You've been preoccupied with talking about other bitches whenever bitches and current events came up," He smirked.

"Well, there are a lot of them!" She insisted, throwing her hooves in the air and letting them fall beside her. "And they're all disgraces to their lineages, their pedigrees, and their society."

"You said it, not me," Sunrise grinned approvingly, relaxing back in his chair, clopping his two forehooves behind his head to make a nice chair. Who is Viper?"

"The bitch who murdered her last four husbands for their money, and got away with it because she can lie to a lie detector's face and temporarily believe she's telling the truth. She can even recall events incorrectly, on purpose, and believe them with such conviction that she can dupe a mind-reader, memory-recaller, truth serum brewer, and anything else Stable Security tried to throw at her."

"Her," Sunrise growled, remembering who she was. A living argument against the inherent virtue of Ponykind, some might say, but he saw her as what happened when a pony ignored one's natural genetic inclination to be good. She had no friends to work with or aid, and no society she loved. All that mattered to her? Her own power, prestige, and funding, because that was all she had, and could want. "Tell me she got caught with the murder weapon."

Evergreen smiled. "Yes, she was caught with the murder weapon. In her right eye."

"Come again?" Sunrise wondered.

The music stopped, and the irritating voice of some mare came from Sunrise's Pip-Buck. "Such a lovely tune. That was Arpeggio's Fugue in D Minor. And now it is time for another riveting instance of my favourite segment, Story Time With Poison Pen."

"Nope," Sunrise swiftly said, switching his radio over to Delightful Melodies For The Discerning Ear. Yet another motherfucking fugue greeted his ears, and- Oh, good, it stopped, and was replaced by a lone violin. Not bad, he supposed. Actually, it was pretty great. Whoever was playing this was fucking dominating that pentatonic scale!

"She stabbed him in the back halfway between a sexual encounter in the sheets. Yes, she decided to stab him while he was 'Stabbing' her, as they say in the vernacular. He was surprised, and then he got angry. He pulled the knife out, and died while penetrating her hilt-deep in more ways than one."

Sunrise burst into laughter. "The absolute fucking madpony!"

"She'd amassed quite a bit of funding over the years, and while she was a hoarder, she was also rich. My off-duty farmers are still going through her boxes of personal belongings, even after a whole year!"

"Your off-duty farmers?" Sunrise asked.

"Unofficially off-duty. They have to work an extra unpaid hour once their shift ends, thanks to my company's contract with each worker, a contract they have to sign when they get the job. However, my company's contract doesn't say they have to spend that hour performing hard labour. I like assigning them lovely leisure activities, such as listening to music. I particularly enjoy assigning this to the hard-working dolts who hate taking time off to take care of themselves, for whatever reason."

"Music…" Sunrise thoughtfully said to himself. "You know what's bullshit about the elites? Rather than appreciating music that says something, they cling to the repetitive tunes of the past for the sake of feeling like classy old ponies, because they believe listening to that sort of music is what classy old ponies do. They have free and easy access to so many places… Gyms, Swimming Pools, and more… That they just don't value these places at all. You can't really value something if you don't give something else up to get it. And who would hit the gym and work hard when there's no social benefit to doing so, and any health benefit would barely matter with how little they use their bodies anyway? They have nothing to do except show off to their friends and enemies when they aren't treating the Vault like their sexual playground, because our society has reached the absolute pinnacle of decadence."

That caught her attention, and raised an eyebrow. "The pinnacle of decadence? Surely, the first ponies to live in this Vault reached that stage, when most of them did nothing apart from breeding all day."

"I respectfully disagree, as those ponies simply played the hooves they were dealt. The elites of now enjoy this unsustainable lifestyle at the expense of lower-level and lower-class ponies."

"I suppose so," She shrugged.

"I wonder if there is a term for that thing these Elites tend to do, where they hit a certain age and feel old and uncool, and then they regress into a foal-like state, abandoning their duties to the greater society for the sake of satisfying their own whims, desires, and impulses, as if acting in an adult manner was always simply a game they've grown tired of playing, and they're ready to pretend they're young and stupid again. I wonder if it stems from an inability to truly understand and appreciate what you have after a long and fruitful life of maturity and emotional stability. After all, contentment and hope for the future are alien concepts to these spoilt brats playing dress-up and pretending to be adults for a while. They hate personal responsibility almost as much as they hate when they don't get what they want. And what they want is to 'Enjoy' their wasteful lifestyles and endless entitlements, no matter what it costs the little pony, or the ponies of the future. The Future… Do these idiots ever stop and think of what effects their actions will have on the future? Have they ever chosen to go a day, or even a few hours without satisfying their needs, for the good of others?"

She didn't say anything.

And then, he felt something. He felt like there was luck somewhere in the aether, waiting for him. Waiting for him to reach out and take it, if only he said the right thing.

But what could that be? He guessed it had to be…

"In any case, I must say, you've done a fine job gathering those pounds of BS. And to get the maximum yield from each floor, even though you would have had to have had those floors you obtained over the months under your control from the start to get those numbers, is truly impressive. How did you get that number so high?"

"Well… Are you familiar with Hoofheld planters?"

"Those pre-war toys designed to get foals into gardening, plastic trays with pots for dirt, a row of hinges keeping a glass lid with round egg-like bulges above each plant, nicknamed Egg Planters." Sunrise nodded, confirming that he knew what they were.

"One of my workers got lucky at a perfectly-legal game of strip poker, and came into a small fortune. Inebriated, and remembering that he normally worked on an Agricultural floor and was one of the ponies I trusted to grow a lot of Black Flowers in secret, he decided to find the nearest florist, and order twelve thousand of these planters to be sent to his room."

Sunrise chuckled. "Isn't his room already full of planters?"

"Well, he always was a tad retarded, and the alcoholism didn't help matters," She shrugged. "In any case, my underlings loaned them to ponies they trusted on other floors, to grow those flowers in secret. We now have more Black Flowers than we have Sander Roots! After all, they're easier to grow, faster to bloom, and easier to justify with the lie that because we are Dark Stars, growing Black Flowers should be a new tradition, like the Neighponese pre-war Samurai and their dwarf trees."

There was no judgement in his voice, he was simply a cheerful friend making an observation. "You didn't come up with that."

"I did not," She proudly admitted, "One of my friends thought of it. I must say, you were right about the wonders of befriending lowborns. They might not understand the nuances of higher Vault politics, but at times, that can be a blessing! And the ideas they think of, now and then… Truly, they think of the most outside-the-box solutions."

He smiled, glad that she'd taken his words on trying to be nicer to her underlings to heart. Sure, she was still an insensitive stuck-up bitch with less tact than a bull in a Zebra shit shop, but she was trying now. She didn't think merely calling the bitches up here bitches was all it took to make her a better pony any more, and that was progress.

Ah, life was good for him.

And soon, when he was done visiting the two other places he had to visit today, life would be great for him.

And soon enough, he would make life great for everypony in Equestria.


Level Up!

New Perk: Critical Banker- You're a patient battlefield tactician, and can save a Critical Hit, to be used in V.A.T.S. when you need it most.