@Wiimeiser  
I recommend listening to crazed ramblings reading of it, you’ll get through it fairly quickly. I listened to the entire thing in about 5 days (with breaks obviously).

@Background Pony #5978  
I haven’t. I guess I should, but it’s longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Also, balefire exists in Wheel of Time, where it has the power of retcon, and I wonder if Kkat knew of that…

@Wiimeiser  
You never read the story, did you? Manehattan was hit by one of the largest bombs, and it was smuggled into the city center using the subway tunnels. It vaporized most of the city. Balefire bombs are magical nuclear bombs, bear in mind.

@Pagan  
But what if it detonated 399 stored others?

@Wiimeiser  
Zebra forces smuggled a megaspell into manehattan through a tram line and the detonation wiped out the city. So just one.

@Pagan  
How many bombs were detonated there? 400?

@Wiimeiser  
Pretty much.

@Pagan  
Apparently nopony in Manehattan made it unless I’m mistaken?

@AJ Aficionado  
Is that ball of sludge to her left her foal?

@Charzoid  
This presumably takes place after she was knocked from the sky after Cloudsdale was nuked from orbit in Fallout Equestria. She’s being “ghoulified” from the radiation. It’s backstory for her character.

Is she dying of radiation or just mutating?

When the Hulk reaches Critical Mass, except it’s Derpy.

Kinda reminds me of Necropolis

Serious heartburn.

@redweasel  
Because Derpys past didn’t get a whole lot of coverage in the story, so I’m making up what might have been. If her impact pre-war was not worth mentioning, then that means anything she did had been destroyed. There’s a lot of snippets about what she did later, I vaguely recall that at one point she found and delivered a water talisman to what eventually became a village, but those are things that I can research once she finds Dinky. Since this is following the words of a song, meant to inspire during difficult times, it would be pointless having things go her way up until the end.
 
There’s nothing inspiring about someone happy going out of their way to do great things, so she needs to be dragged low enough that most would give up before they have a chance to begin, and then dragging not only herself, but everyone else out of the pit of despair. Derpy seems the type to help however she can, to laugh in the face of danger, and yet she lacks the qualities of a hero. By doing this, I’m giving her those qualities, which always requires a sacrifice.
 
Maybe she’s saving others because she couldn’t save her daughter, and hopes that if she saves enough ponies the wasteland will give her daughter back somehow.
 
I think those are pretty good reasons to do this, right?

why must you do this…

@MoonlitBrush  
I look forward to the feels.

@Pagan  
Well, in this I’m intending to make it so that Dinky was her daughter, I was just correcting you on the point that this isn’t canon. So, since Dinky grew up and became a doomed firefighter in this version, you can expect more feels down the line.

@MoonlitBrush  
Yeah, it probably was a reference to it, for all I know.

@EPPony  
Yep, same here. I read in a few places (and assumed as much while reading) that the foals coloration (when it’s described) was a reference to Dinky, but other than that Derpy had nothing.

@MoonlitBrush  
@EPPony  
Actually you’re right about that she is never directly mentioned or implied to exist in that canon and most likely wasn’t considered her daughter. So I’m just going to insert my fanon because I can and no one can stop me.

@MoonlitBrush  
Actually, if I remember right, the writer of the original Fo:E stated that Derpy in the story wasn’t based off of any of the fanon she had at the time, so technically, the Derpy in the story wouldn’t have Dinky as her daughter (though I’m still surprised no one had drawn Dinky meeting Silver Bell).

@Pagan  
I mean that the story never actually mentions her having a kid, and that instead the filly was a reference to Dinky, not a replacement for her.

Gods I cannot get over how cool this looks.

@MoonlitBrush  
Yeah that’s why it’s implied, Dinky didn’t become a ghoul and we never see her and Derpy doesn’t have a kid till the adoption so yeah she died, now whether she died directly from the bombs or shortly after from something else is left up to the reader but she is definitely dead.