Well, I think that's enough of my trying to copy Mr. Plinkett's jokes ("Oh" aside). Now it's time for me to continue with Fallout Equestria: Memories.
If I recall correctly, when last I left off, our heroine had lost consciousness and was having some kind of trippy dream.
So yeah. She's all tied up and her claw's been detached. Baked Potato enters in (oh yeah, this is the guy with the accent) and asks how she's been.
Baked Potato reveals that she's been out for a full day, and that her current state is thanks to Rumcake, who by this point I am sure is going to either be a party member or love interest. Or both.
Well, I guess maybe it's not as dumb as that other branch that gave a prisoner their equipment in a locked box that they hadn't bothered to inspect.
Rumcake, it seems, is going to be a wee bit stricter about her prisoning. Baked Potato also reveals he's done some upgrades to her claw. Twice. He says it first in one paragraph:
and then a few paragraphs later:
So then Instant Noodles enters the room to give her psych evaluation. Punks her with a fake eval.
I'm going to assume that Soufflé isn't dead. You'd think that that'd come up. Or maybe the author's just dicking with me, setting up that cliffhanger in the second chapter and then promptly proceeding to not answer it.
So she's on a bomb collar. Frosty asks about Soufflé, and it turns out he's alive, but still out. Instant Noodles asks why she wants to know. Frosty, realizing that she's been caught in a suspicious place and is walking on thin ice with heavily armed paramilitary folks who can easily kill her if she steps out of line... just fesses up.
Huh. Didn't see that coming. Next bit of conversation has Frosty being a bit more touchy-feely. Instant Noodles is surprisingly empathetic on this. Huh. Empathy. That's new. She briefly mentions her father, and how he told her that she "needed to be a better pony." Instant Noodles asks her some questions, but due to the holes in her memories she can't really answer them.
Shut up, Frosty. I have no idea.
Well, thanks for helping, brain.
A messenger comes in and announces that Soufflé has come to and wants to see Instant Noodles and Frosty Winds. The rangers are nice enough to let her use the bathroom first, but due to missing a limb she falls on her face.
Shut up, Frosty.
“Help. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”
So we have a change of scene. What Soufflé says to her is rather surprising.
He asks her why she didn't murder him, and she answers:
So we're actually getting some nice character stuff, then. It might've been nice to have gotten a bit more of a hint about this back in the last chapter. I mean, at the end of the last chapter I wasn't even completely sure whether she'd shot Soufflé or the slaver. Given the fact that this story is in first-person, that would've left me with the assumption that she didn't know whether she'd shot him or not. Well, I guess she did know, given that she was counting in the scene in question. Still didn't do that good of a job communicating it. Yeah, I guess you could reason that you could discern it from context, that the steel rangers weren't shooting at anything when they arrived, or how it'd just make more sense to shoot at the person who was shooting you...
But action scenes are boring clusterfucks in these fics.
Anyway, he dismisses the two after getting a brief progress report from Instant Noodles. Apparently no Steel Rangers actually died. Three are recovering and one is in surgery, but no mention of deaths.
So like I said, essentially the slavers did a suicidal attack on guys who were well-entrenched and better-armed than they themselves were.
After some prodding by Instant Noodles, Frosty glumly exposits that she's pretty much dead to the Enclave and how some couple probably has a certificate to have a foal now.
She has some dinner and a badly-written note from Baked Potato (someone isn't winning any spelling bees any time soon) and a rifle cleaning kit.
These folks really are hospitable.
So she starts cleaning the gun.
Then Rumcake shows up and they talk about it some more.
I exhaled in exhaustion. Why did everypony want to know? “I’m a good pony,” I explained again. “I’m better than just petty revenge.” I looked up from my cleaning. “Sometimes, sacrifices must be made for the good of the future.” I proceeded to start putting the body of the rifle together. I’d cleaned out all the blood I could and the mechanism was feeling a lot smoother. “You also owe me one anti-machine bullet.”
Also, the author has a bit of a thing with the indentation. Here's what I mean: If you indent in Google Docs, there are basically two ways - one where you can set the typing cursor thing to have one thing to the left of the indent, and one thing where the indent is as left as it goes. If you can move the typing cursor thing (I'm certain there is a word for it. Somebody please tell me the word for it) to the left, then when you import it into the Fimfiction thing it's going to put an extra space in the indent. It's a quirk with the way the doc uploader works.
Then they flirt for a little bit. Frosty Winds goads him into a kiss (there was a mention last chapter that he had "dreamy eyes," so it's not completely out of the blue), but Rumcake does a bait-and-switch and shoves a cock in her mouth I mean a cake in her mouth.
However, he does give her a peck on the cheek, which she seems to like. Cute scene, I suppose, all in all.
There are some jokes in this chapter. Earlier there was a thing where Frosty objected to being carried and asked to be put down, which results in her falling on her face. This next scene has her ask the same thing, but realizing the imminent pain she recants.
So Baked Potato takes her to a workbench where she can continue working on her gun. You know, is this like some kind of reverse Stockholm Syndrome? At this point she's barely even a prisoner. She's more like a guarded guest.
He shows her her new claw, which, rather than have the description narrate the fanciness, has them say what the upgrades are. I'm not sure whether or not I think this is a bad thing. I remember the terrible description dumps from The Clown Prince of Equestria and I think "Eh, this is okay. It works and the dialogue makes sense."
Oh yeah, another running gag this chapter is, um... Frosty's correspondence with her brain? I dunno. It's not much of a joke. It's a recurring thing, I guess. I guess "shut up" is kind of an inherently funny phrase.
So then we're introduced to a new character: Fruit Punch. It takes Frosty a minute to remember who she is (she was mentioned by Soufflé), which makes sense, 'cause I don't remember the mention from earlier. That's a pretty nice touch.
Baked Potato leaned over and told me, “When the Stampede kicks in, she goes in like a manticore and backhoofs everythin’, guns or no.” I looked to Fruit and she nodded. “This one time this insane lass single hoofedly ran in and punched a raider stronghold apart. Not a single grenade fired. It was amazin’!”
I gave her a puzzled look but she just smiled and left. I raised an eyebrow at Baked.
"What? It’s not my fault all I’m ‘llowed to do is fix things! Ya know how borin’ that is? I need somethin’ to dooooo!” He kneeled at my hooves and held my shoulders. “Let me work my magic on ye!”
As if called to action, Rumcake suddenly decided to walk in. “So, Fruit Punch tells me—” And he stopped in mid sentence when he saw Baked essentially begging in front of me as I stood there in shock. “Uh… am I interrupting something here?”
“This probably isn’t what it looks like!” I blurted. My cheeks burned. Oh dear Celestia, why did these things happen to me all the time? I could feel Gala Frosty facehoofing with me in my mind. Oh Celestia, why?
“Let me guess… he wants to play with your claw thing because he’s bored.” Rumcake guessed. I looked at him in surprise. He saw me and all he had to say was, “What? I know my Potato well.” They shared a brohoof and grinned. “So he gave you your claw thing back. I guess I can live with that,” Rumcake told me. “Think of it as an apology about the whole snack cake thing yesterday.”
Grass is blue, sky is green, change of time is change of scene (I'll bet none of you know the reference).
Frosty Winds is surprised by how huge the Steel Rangers are in their power armor. She climbs on Rumcake's back. Star Paladin Cheese Puffs enters, panics, and tries to murder her. A little scuffle later, blah blah blah...
Well, that scene was brief. I'm assuming Cheese Puffs is going to be an important character, at least for this chapter. Baked Potato and Instant Noodles talk about how cool it is that she gave Cheese Puffs a well-deserved kick. Then someone named Knight Cabbage Stew enters and introduces himself. Like Baked Potato, he has an accent.
“There are a few places in this base where it leads to a tunnel system. It’s like this place was built inside a tunnel system, and the places where it leads into the tunnels are like the original tunnels,” Rumcake explained. We all gave him a blank stare. “Pretend I’m making sense, okay?”
Distantly down the hall, we all heard the faint cry of, “Aw burnin’ hell and tarnation!”
So she's given a 10mm SMG. Sigh.
Okay. Here's the thing about action scenes. In order for me to be engaged, generally speaking, it needs to be either aesthetically or narratively engaging. It gets aesthetically engaging by having interesting stuff happen (for example, that bit in the FOE where Littlepip uses pie tins to make a staircase). It gets narratively engaging when I understand what's going on - why the action is happening and what the stakes are.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. What is going on? There's been a breach. Someone's calling out sector numbers and stuff. I don't know what those mean so whatevs. That autocorrects to "wharves," by the way. I think I'll start using that. Wharves.
A raider apparently has a rocket launcher. Okay. So basically I'm getting the sense that the raiders are linked with the slavers. Maybe the slavers are hiring the raiders? Or they're both hired by someone? Either way, this indicates to me that someone wants the raiders to attack them and is supplying weapons for that purpose.
That, or the raider just has a rocket launcher.
Oh, wait. There are slavers here with the raiders.
Fruit Punch injects her with Stampede (she took a hit and is bleeding a bit), and she goes on a drug-fueled killing spree.
“No… Oh no…” I whispered. “What have I done?” I got off the pony I’d been slashing. His forelegs were bloody and gouged from where I’d attacked him. Blood dripped from my claw as I sat there, comprehending what I’d just done. “I’m so sorry,” I told him. He was very confused by what was happening right now. These ponies weren’t raiders! They were wastelanders, just trying to get by. Cheese Puffs had said something about a water talisman… “You’re here for the talisman, aren’t you?” The wastelander nodded slowly.
My bones were killing me. My muscles were burning. I was getting lightheaded, probably because of the massive amount of blood loss over the course of the last few minutes. I climbed off him. “I’m… sorry,” I muttered before I leaned against the cool metal of the walls. So tired… the Stampede was wearing off and I was really starting to feel the full weight of the pain I was in…
So she passes out and has another hallucination scene where she talks to herself. And the herself she's talking to is drunk. Well, there's Narrator Frosty, Drunk Frosty, and Gala Frosty.
Yeah, I'm not even going to try to figure out whether this makes sense or not.
Oh. And there's also Nurse Frosty and Filly Frosty (or rather "Filly Fwosty").
So anyway, the chapter ends with this and Frosty Feeling remorseful that she was just killing wastelanders who were trying to get by (granted they were trying to get by by breaking in and attacking, but I guess there's still plenty of room to feel bad about it).
Well, the story's getting better. I think I might be warming up to Frosty a little. Maybe next time I update I'll be funnier. I can't really think of a good closing joke here.
Comments
, and the only ones you've met so far are Frosty and Rumcake. Everyone else will slowly disappear from the story as Bobulator works out what the fic is actually supposed to be about. :P
