[b]Hoover Wasteland[/b]

Out of the gate, and on the open roads again. For once a brahmin at his back, and a sack full of salvage. A gun in its holster at his hip. Cracked asphalt at his hooves. The alternating warmth of concrete and the cool muddy feeling of mud. The crackling breeze as it twisted through the bending boughs of two-hundred year dead trees.

It had been ten years since Equestria as he knew was scrubbed clean of balefire radiation and the pockets of taint which made malicious monsters. Though it was not a doubt they still remained, the wasteland looked as if it could breath again. If a little.

Poking up around the rocks left behind where buildings once stood or the metal wrecks of skywagons long crashed and abandoned the green signs of life grew weakly. Though much if it weak and yellowing, purity was returning to Equestria. Slowly, but progress was visible. Colors no pony has ever seen in the wider wastes were springing to growth, dampening the strength of the oppressing gray and brown of a desolated wasteland. Adding greens and yellows were the first dormant plants grew out as pioneers to a restored world.

But these splashes of colors still were subjects to the oppression of wasteland gray. But beyond the cities it was a change. In the industrial, urban ruin of Equestria past there was naught but neon to change the gray. But that was unnatural, alien. It did nothing to make the pony feel well to himself the way a fledgling blade of grass peeling out through the empty skull of a carbonized skeleton. Signs of healing were abundant in the wider wasteland, where it permitted. But the cities were still a ruin.

For Rusted, cities were little more than a glorified roadhouse. Though large, complex, and inhabited by many they were just not a home to him. He had not been born into a city. He hadn't been born to be sedentary. For as long as he remembered he was moving. He, and his families. When a cousin was born to his small clan they'd be on the move hardly a day after.

There was comfort in being on the move. Though having lost his own family and their caravan, Rusted had seen too many burned out and raided out settlements plucked off the face of the Wasteland by raiders or monsters. He had seen far few wrecks of a caravan. And when he had come to after loosing his own kin, struggled up in the care of that doctor, he had moved out first thing as soon as he could. He just wasn't built. He wasn't that sort of pony.

And stopping just meant he couldn't outrace that moment. He had to keep moving. To move past it. He had found ways as much as Alms had found his own.

He hadn't ever had an experience as easy as at the gates of that one of several nameless Hoover settlements. All checkpoints, no matter who owned them, had an element of scrutiny. But there... There they had given back his gear and waved them off. No one questioned the heavy metal box that weighed on his Brahmin's back. They looked at him, faces relentless in their apathy and nodded him off.

And without story or protest, he was in the wasteland. Heading east.

He danced in his head the map of Equestria as he knew it. Hardly orderly, a abstract and distorted vision of the nation that fitted more his concept of placement than it did distance. Route 29 would have taken Rusted due north of Gallopping Gorge, forcing him to flirt with the cold winds that flowed from the north. Though whether or not those were dealt by Light Bringer wasn't a matter he knew off, they were always chilly and dark. Even by day there was a lingering arctic cloud. One that threatened snow until coming to a brisk billowing stop.

27 would cut him over the gorge. But he would have to head south first, to the Smokey Mountain and the tail of the Unicorn range. Though not entering them and leaving the sand-blasted and naked peaks to his southern face. Chase the range over the gorge's southern tip. Then into the mountains Canterlot called home, brisking several miles north of the cratered city. And he could find his way there.

The voyage would be long, and speckled with only small settlements. But that would be expected of the Equestrian North-West.

_________________________

[i]Level Gained[/i]
[i]Level footnote: level 2[/i]
[i]Skill footnote: Barter 32/100 [/i]