Pannic Reads Stuff He Hates

Raider Haters

Chapter 2 of Duck and Cover opens where the last chapter left off, with Atom Smasher joining up with a pair of traveling merchants. She is, of course, a right little snotrag with the two of them, nearly provoking Hard Sell to smash her face in with a pan. Fortunately for Atom Smasher (and possibly unfortunately for us), Sand Dollar calms him down. And then Atom Smasher makes a crack about them being gay.

Then raiders attack, blah blah blah action scene. And we get this.

Wow, combat description really is the most dense thing, isn't it? I mean that was two paragraphs spent talking about what, five seconds of action? I'm trying to be economical here but prose is just not friendly to that kind of thing. Based on how the rest of this goes, better brace yourselves for an awful lot of bullet time. Shit's gonna be like the Maretrix, just without the cool kung fu and the sharp suits.

So Atom Smasher fights back with her exploding dart launcher.

With practiced movements, I pumped the gun and fired three times. Click-pfft, click-pfft, click-pfft.

This bit is a reference to Littlepip's zebra rifle in the original story, where the story used "pfft" as a sound effect for Littlepip firing it. This prompted me to comment that when reading I imagined she was firing a NERF gun. So the author here just took that to its logical conclusion.

Just goes to show: onomatopoeia is a crapshoot.

I cocked the gun, leaned forward and put the tip of my gun to the nearer one's head. They stopped climbing. "I know what you're thinking," I growled, mustering as much gravel in my voice as I could. "Did I fire six shots, or only five?" Never mind that it was actually four. "To tell the truth, in all this excitement I've forgotten myself. But being as this is a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself one question: 'do I feel lucky?' Well, do you? Punk?" I had a feeling it was a safe bet that raiders didn't see many movies. The two of them just sat there for a couple of seconds, before the one without the gun at her head huffed and rolled her eyes.

Yeah. This fic has a lot of pop culture references for no reason. One train of thought might be that it's sort of thumbing it's nose at the original story's tendency to insert memes and lines from the show to varying degrees of "oh no why," but if I were doing that I'd have, like, characters who keep saying certain phrases and have the protagonist get annoyed at that, or maybe the other way around, or oh forget it. The train of thought here is clearly "Dirty Marey is a fun pun."

Also, wait, handgun? I... oh, forget it, guns setups don't make any sense in this setting as-is, why bother.

So, Atom Smasher kills the attacking raiders and finds that the merchants have been killed.

Guys?" I said. Still nothing. I knew I should probably feel something. Hell, I even knew their names before they died, so they were supposed to be halfway sympathetic too. But I wasn't getting anything. I mean, if we're using 'feel' in its broadest sense, I felt kinda cold and wet from all the playing in the mud, and perhaps a kleptomaniacal urge to tear apart the caravan for anything useful, but not a lot else. The worst feeling that crossed my mind was probably rage at myself for looking at the raider who ate a bomb and coming up with the line 'not a time to lose one's head'. Argh. That made me feel dirtier than all the gore and mud put together.

Line about names and sympathy. That's just a little too fourth-wally.

She loots the caravan, finds fairly little of value, and chalks up her current score as 4/0/2 (Sandy and Sell are assists). All in all, she's pretty pleased with how things are going.

She then loots the raiders and puts on their armor (sound familiar?) and continues on. She comes across two other raiders, but she flexes her wings and that's a giveaway. They give chase, but one of them accidentally shoots the other in the head because firing a gun with your teeth is a bad idea. The other one continues trying to shoot before Atom Smasher kicks his head in to death.

She continues wandering aimlessly for "fifteen forevers" and comes across more raiders, who don't attack her. She determines that they're going somewhere and decides to follow them to their camp.

The camp was in a ruined stadium, with one half of the stands either collapsed or torn down for scrap, so I could see through to the other half. It was about now that I started noticing white and blue flags every now and then, with some circular 'CWFC' icon painted in blood on some of them. A group that I passed was kicking a skull about while one pony stood in front of two bones stuck in the ground. Suddenly, one of them kicked it at him, and he dived to catch it. It bounced off his head and past the bones, and the pony that kicked it jumped victoriously. This is what we call thematic foreshadowing, where I string together a bunch of related images in quick succession all like 'NOTICE THIS'.

Then there's this

"Oy!" A gruff voice grabbed my attention away from spectating the footskull game. Two of them had come up next to me, a broken-horned unicorn that looked like he ate for two, and an earth pony that looked like he'd blow away in the wind. "What's the toy?" He went to point at the Nerf gun in its holster, and shoved me in his carelessness. I forced a chuckle while I tried to copy his accent.

"This inn't no toy, mate. Check it." I sat back on my haunches, took it out and pumped it. I could try and blow his head off, but he was so fat that it might take two shots. Instead, I took aim at the skull the goalie had just booted into the air. Pfft, pop. Shards of bone rained. I caught the dart in my teeth as it spun away, and chambered it again. It might have been even more metal if I'd blown my jaw off in the catch, but I was content to maintain my mandibular faculties.

"Nice! Gizza go," the thin one sneered.

I hopped back and holstered it. "Haha! Eat an acre of shit."

The fat one thumped his companion in the shoulder and he fell over. "Yeah, Sticks, don't be a prat!" They started arguing, and I hurried along while they distracted each other.

These two are gonna be recurring characters, Sticks and Stones. That's pretty much the only reason I'm copypasting this.

So then after a while Atom Smasher gets bored having random conversation with raiders. The turning point?

I think I might have actually been around long enough to start seeing personality in some of the raiders.

Haha! Geddit? Because the raiders in the original were completely one-dimensional!

But pointing out a problem means nothing if you don't do something with it. What does the author do with the raiders to make them more interesting? After all, Project Horizons has that whole cannibal virus thing, Murky Number Seven still has them cartoonishly evil but does more to indicate they have something resembling a social structure...

This story gives them soccer teams.

"There's some right beauties in this catch. I can see the trophy now: Colton Wanderers, FA cup champions!" The ponies around the fire cheered. "Drink up! Tomorrow we smash Balkburn!" They cheered again, and descended into drinking and chatter.

Of course, even with all this wackiness, Atom Smasher decides she's had enough just starts murdering everyone she can. By this point we can state the obvious: Atom Smasher is a send-up of Littlepip. Both of them are dicks who will murder stuff at the drop of a hat. Littlepip murders stuff because she's angry and vindictive. Atom Smasher is different: she murders stuff because she's bored.

So anyway, another action scene. Yeah. In an effort to compensate for the inevitable boredom that these scenes bring, the author attempts to spice it up with varying kinds of wackiness. Like having the protagonist using mines as frisbees.

"Hey!" I called.

"What?" one of them answered. Retard.

Heh.

But ultimately I'm bored and just kinda skimming the page for when the next main character shows up.

Then, as luck would have it, she comes across a cell full of cowering ponies. She changes her outfit... iiiiin front of them, I guess, but then again it's ponies.

She briefly considers just murdering them, but then decides that'd be boring and instead decides she wants an escort quest. So she breaks them out and gets ready to leave and wait, that was the entire chapter? It was longer than the first! I guess just not a lot happened.

Level up! Hey, what the hell is this? Why is New perk: Soccer Hooligan

Your critical chance doubles when using footballs and improvised footballs.

In the original story, Littlepip's perks corresponded to a skill she used or developed in the chapter. In this they're based on things that happened in the chapter, but they're random and generally aren't "used" later.

Welp, back to Project Horizons.