F:E Chapter 2 - Littlepip's First Time Outside

Nothingness!

My first several seconds outside were a heart-bursting eternity of hoof-pounding terror! The story had been right! All that was outside was a great black nothingness! It surrounded me, suffocating. If I had been able to draw breath, I would have screamed.

And then my eyes started to adjust to the darkness. I began to calm, gasping, feeling weak (and not just a little foolish). In my defense, I had never experienced night before. Not really. Sure, I’d always turned off the lights before curling into bed, but that darkness was small, confined to my little room. And there was always the glow from under the door. The hall lights of Stable Two were eternal.

This was different. A cool air, quite unlike anything within the Stable, tickled my coat and chilled my skin beneath. It bore smells that were dank and rotting, dusty and alien. I could hear the sounds of night insects, creaking of wood and a far-off sloshing... but I was struck more by what I couldn’t hear -- the constant low hum of the Stable’s generators and the ever-present high whine of the lights were gone -- so powerful in their absence that I first mistook the outside as silent. I could feel dirt and broken stone beneath my hooves, so unlike the smooth and sterile floors I had trotted all my life. And though I could not see much or far, I could see further than I had ever seen before, and there were no walls to mark the end of the room. I was staring into a horizontal abyss that stretched out from me in every direction.

An entirely new panic began to form within me. My hind legs went out from under me and I sat, stunned. I turned my gaze to the ground, breathing deeply, thanking it not only for holding me up, but being a visual endpoint. Then I made the mistake of looking up into the sky, and the absolute endless up-ness of it sent my head spinning and my stomach lurching. Great masses of clouds rolled over most of the sky; but there were gaps through which soft light poured and through those I could see the up went on forever. Insanely, I thought of the clouds as a great net, made to catch me if I fell from the earth into the yawning gulf above; but if I slipped through the holes, I would just fall up forever.

I clenched my eyes shut and tried to keep from vomiting.

This is my Chapter 2 picture for my Fallout: Equestria challenge, as well as my entry for 's Week 67 theme: A Pony of the Night. Well, in the night at least. As the story segment above indicates, this picture shows Littlepip's first moments after exiting Stable 2. Having literally spent all of her life inside of a perpetually lit enclosure, it's not surprising that her departure results in two separate panic attacks; the first caused by the inky blackness of night, and the second by the vast emptiness of the outdoors.

Picture was hand-drawn, then vector-traced with Inkscape.

Credit goes to and for creating MLP:FiM, to Interplay and Bethesda for creating/expanding the Fallout universe, and to (kkat) for merging these into Fallout: Equestria.
Additional credit goes to and his Cloud Tutorial, for giving me a decent idea of how to create the cloudscape. From what I understand, the Equestrian Wasteland sky is perpetually shrouded in clouds, so I'll likely be doing this a lot.