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... Cautiously, Battery stepped onto the remains of the bridge, wary of it giving way beneath him.

"Dont'cha worry, it's safe," Sunny's voice came from behind him, chipper as ever. "It'll hold ya up all right. Better raise yer eyes and stop staring at yer hooves already. I didn't stop here for nothin'.

Heeding her advice, Battery raised his head...

The expanse of rolling grassy hills stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction; the warm afternoon sunlight illuminated the land, making it seem as if the Vagabond stood amid an endless sea of gilded green, the grasses shifting like waves under a gentle breeze. The great mountains of the Unicorn range seemed almost like a faraway island, barely visible on the horizon, and even the colossal Mount Canterlot with its sprawling crags looked like a mere stony needle jutting out of the endless steppe to the north.

The only thing truly standing out from the uniform landscape was right in front of him: strips of grey emerged from among the hills, partially overgrown and hidden by the sea of green, and converged in the wide and shallow vale the broken-off bridge was jutting into. It was strewn with dusty, stony rubble that Battery could recognize as belonging to other bridges, over a dozen of them; several massive pillars jutted out of the debris, broken off at various heights, their girth and the sheer size of some pieces of rubble close by indicating the bridges' once awe-inpiring dimensions.

A minute passed in silence, Battery standing there near-motionless and Sunny Trail observing him from the Vagabond's roof.

"Heh. I knew you'll like it," she chuckled, which made Battery shiver as if he were jerked awake.

"Sunny? Tell me... Was... were all roads like this in the old times? Were Equestrians all speeding down... these huge bridges of stone and metal in gleaming vehicles?" Battery's voice sounded dreamy, the young stallion clearly envisioning his thoughts as he said them aloud.

"Nah. This here place, my old folks called an "interchange". Showed me a map older than them, this place had a fancy sign for it and everythin'. A whole buncha roads, big and small, came together here, and they had to get cars on an' off an' such, so they had to make all these ramps an' bypasses to make sure they didn't run into one another." She glanced across the hills, recognizing the familiar remains of ancient pavement she had come to associate with specific directions. "Me, I call it the Old Crossroads. One o' the few big landmarks in the Expanse, very good for orientin' yerself. Find a wide enough bit o' grey road, you can follow it to here."

Battery's head hadn't moved, his eyes still fixated on the rubble strewn across the vale before him. "So the greyroads are everywhere?.. Where did they lead? Was this place... like this back then too?"

"Well, it wasn't. As far as I know, there used to be forests, even cliffs, an' lots of towns an' villages... It isn't called the Heartland for nothin', it was the core of Equestria. An' then... somethin' happened. No idea what, nopony I met could give me anythin' conclusive. But... if you look, most of old-time stuff is in the low places an' the hilltops are all bare an' tall things are all broken like those there supports you're starin' at, an' nothing but grass seems ta grow 'ere now, an' the water here makes ya feel funny if ye don't purify it with a magic kit first... Me, I think 'twas a magic catastrophe of some sort, leveled the entire place."

Battery turned to look at her as she spoke. Although he and Sunny were a few pony lengths apart, she could see the gleam in his eyes.

"And the Equestrians could do that? Could have something like that happen?"

"Well... look around, lad. Would we be standing 'ere now otherwise?" Sunny smirked.

"You know so much about the Equestrians... Of course you would, you have their coat of arms on the window," Battery smiled awkwardly. "S-sorry, I'm... not used to so much... or being out of Orange, at all... I mean to say, I'm..." Battery lowered his eyes bashfully, "I thank you for taking me in, for letting me see this with my own eyes... I hated it in Orange, and with you I can see the world, find out more about Equestria than the legends said..." He closed his eyes for a moment and smiled bashfully. "I hope I can repay you for this somehow."

Sunny felt the urge to pull up her hood and sat down on the roof plates to do so. "Eh, it's nothin'. It's nice to have a unicorn aboard, yer magic will help a whole lot. And yer skill at keepin' those ol' boxes o' scrap that passed for machinery in Orange up an' running will sure help me make the Vagabond better 'an it ever's been. We'll start with fixin' the ol' gun mount, no real opportunity to make a good livin' without goin' farther from Bastion an' into wilder areas. I'll show ye what needs to be done."

"Alright, Sunny... thanks," Battery said, looking at her with a kind of awkward stare that she had become so familiar with during the months of trading with Orange. She felt thankful that they were not standing face to face. "So... what do we do now?"

"Now... Now we need to gather some water an' purify it, that'll be yer job. There's a source close by. Then we eat, an' after that we find a place to conceal the Vagabond for the night. No need to rush, we wouldn't make it to Canterfall before night falls anyway, an' there're a few good spots for stoppin' 'round here. But right now..." Sunny smiled warmly, "Just take a break and enjoy the view, Battery."

"Thank you," the stallion said warmly. "Will you tell me more about... well, what you know of the past?"

"'Course I will, if you like. We're a team now, can't go travelin' together without good talk an' fun an' friendship. Now that you know all 'bout the Vagabond, it'll be a fine thing to talk of."

Battery smiled wider, looking happy, and turned back to gaze at the majestic vastness of the land and the timeworn ruins of the interchange lit up in warm yellows and oranges, likely trying to imagine how it all used to be.

Sunny, meanwhile, looked at the young unicorn himself. She thought back to Orange, to when she first met him; her status as the first outside visitor to come to that small and far-flung community in many years instantly gave her a flair of mystery and adventure and, together with her easygoing and approachable manner, her tales and the new and strange goods and gadgets she brought, it made her the star of the town, but this particular stallion stood out - he rarely left her side whenever she was there, never seemed to be out of questions about her, her travels and what she brought even when the novelty of her presence faded for others, and treated her with breathless, awed admiration. And Sunny couldn't brush aside the fact that she found this scrawny, unkempt, endearingly awkward, endlessly curious and thoughtful pony irrepressibly cute, or that she was tired of being alone and felt a sharp need for a permanent companion. Finding it too much to bear, she used part of her profits to buy as much new machinery as the Vagabond could carry in Bastion and bargained with the elders of Orange to give it all to them in return for letting her take Battery along; without the need to constantly fix the old and failing equipment, which was Battery's responsibility, they had no objections to her taking away a member they had no real use for otherwise, while Battery himself couldn't believe the news but agreed to leave immediately. Now, looking at the stallion below and ahead of her, Sunny smiled and blushed a little, thinking this has been the best deal in her entire life. It'd been two days since they left Orange, and everything was going nearly as she hoped and imagined it would. Her dream life was starting to become reality in the best way possible.

"It's... sad," Battery's voice reached her, pulling her out of the rosy-tinted fantasies of their immediate future she was slipping into. "The Equestrians not being here anymore, I mean. I wish I could see this place when they were still here. Now it's so... empty." The young unicorn sounded pensive.

"But beautiful too," Sunny said softly, just loud enough for Battery to hear.

"Yes... Empty, but beautiful. I'm... glad I can see all this with you. You're making my dreams come true."

Hearing the emotions in the stallion's voice, Sunny just nodded to herself and smiled absentmindedly, staring off into the distance, her thoughts and her cheeks becoming rosier still. Things were truly looking up for her at last.

And the above sheet o' words is why I haven't submitted this sketch for well over a week even though I meant to do it right away! It is as it always happens with me: the idea was to upload it the night before I went to the trip I'm writing this from, but then the usual whirl of events and distractions that sweeps you up during a vacation came into the equation. Plus, originally I intended to just make an atmospheric caption paragraph to this, but then I ended up thinking more about the characters and the setting and a week later - here we are, a flippin' mini-fanfic. And now you can see why exactly I stopped attempting to write any fics in addition to how much I fail at art! Dat disastrous pacing, dat horrible characterisation, dat sappy idea, dat disastrously written dialogue. And my overly big love for worldbuilding makes it a huge exposition bomb. Bleh. I'm sorry if you had to read it.

Oh well, it's not like most of ye will care much or even read this. Which is why I don't care either and just build things for my own amusement. If you don't like it, nothing's keeping ya.

I have to say that I'm strongly drawn to the concept of scavenging and repurposing random, unrelated things and items, particularly on a large scale, and turning things such as vehicles such as cars or trains, their wreckages and ruins and just collections of scrap into dwellings of various levels of sophistication. I love thinking which scrap plate or board or which salvaged object goes where and how to plot out a comfortable living space inside and on, say, a standard truck in order for it to be protected and comfortable both. Another little thing I love is improvised armoring and arming of vehicles that aren't built for a combat purpose. Both of these you can see here, in form of an old truck with an enclosed compartment made of welded and bolted-together plates of scrap metal and parts of other vehicles constructed on its chassis, made to be tough and at least resemble an APC. It is supposed to have armaments too, but the in-universe explanation of their absence is that the main gun had been destroyed and had to be removed, and its mounting point is currently hosting a higher-powered radar emitter and receiver. The drawing explanation is that I just ran out of time before I could design it. Others just aren't present yet, in this version.

I'm ashamed of how long it took me to do this sketch, and it isn't even complete yet. Funnily enough, it started off as just an attempt to draw something quickly, for a change from a bigger and more tiresomely detailed idea. But then I ended up trying to add detail and didn't manage to finish it in one day. It was sometime back in April... Since then I detailed it further, tried shading techniques that failed miserably and did several redraws of most parts. And about a week or two before the trip, I moved the whole thing from SAI to Photoshop and did a complete redrawing using the original version as a reference. Even so, every day I spent around 2 hours trying to draw, and most of that time, in turn, was being spent on procrastinating or being distracted, so the actual drawing time was just a few minutes refining or redoing this or that element. Then I decided to upload a version as it was before the trip, and so hurried to add crucial details I had been putting off, most importantly the ponies; the time I spent on the ponies was somewhere around 10 minutes of actual drawing for both.

As a final note to this already article-size description - yes, there'll be an improved version; the roughness of some lines is temporary (though one of the reasons I like the scrap aesthetic is that I can get away with my inability to do clean lines), the plates are supposed to have different tones or even colours and the grass and bridge and some other bits are placeholders and there should be a sky and some small but crucial details are still missing; and yes, I could've put canon ponies in there or not used anything pony at all and it would've worked just as fine or better, but 1) I want my pictures and the setting to be pony, so there, and 2) I don't see any canon pony in this idea, as I wasn't seeing it as an alternate postapocalyptic Equestria in the present day but rather far in the future, and I don't like seeing canon ponies in postapocalyptic or broken worlds anyway.

Wellp, here it is. Feel free to rip into it, but be reminded that I never intended this as an example of goodness nor do I see it as anything more than a practice sketch and a case of runaway worldbuilding (they're like pest plants sometimes, really).

P.S.: Mobile sta.sh seems to dislike html code for italics. I'll try to italicise the vehicle name later.

Description

... Cautiously, Battery stepped onto the remains of the bridge, wary of it giving way beneath him.

"Dont'cha worry, it's safe," Sunny's voice came from behind him, chipper as ever. "It'll hold ya up all right. Better raise yer eyes and stop staring at yer hooves already. I didn't stop here for nothin'.

Heeding her advice, Battery raised his head...

The expanse of rolling grassy hills stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction; the warm afternoon sunlight illuminated the land, making it seem as if the Vagabond stood amid an endless sea of gilded green, the grasses shifting like waves under a gentle breeze. The great mountains of the Unicorn range seemed almost like a faraway island, barely visible on the horizon, and even the colossal Mount Canterlot with its sprawling crags looked like a mere stony needle jutting out of the endless steppe to the north.

The only thing truly standing out from the uniform landscape was right in front of him: strips of grey emerged from among the hills, partially overgrown and hidden by the sea of green, and converged in the wide and shallow vale the broken-off bridge was jutting into. It was strewn with dusty, stony rubble that Battery could recognize as belonging to other bridges, over a dozen of them; several massive pillars jutted out of the debris, broken off at various heights, their girth and the sheer size of some pieces of rubble close by indicating the bridges' once awe-inpiring dimensions.

A minute passed in silence, Battery standing there near-motionless and Sunny Trail observing him from the Vagabond's roof.

"Heh. I knew you'll like it," she chuckled, which made Battery shiver as if he were jerked awake.

"Sunny? Tell me... Was... were all roads like this in the old times? Were Equestrians all speeding down... these huge bridges of stone and metal in gleaming vehicles?" Battery's voice sounded dreamy, the young stallion clearly envisioning his thoughts as he said them aloud.

"Nah. This here place, my old folks called an "interchange". Showed me a map older than them, this place had a fancy sign for it and everythin'. A whole buncha roads, big and small, came together here, and they had to get cars on an' off an' such, so they had to make all these ramps an' bypasses to make sure they didn't run into one another." She glanced across the hills, recognizing the familiar remains of ancient pavement she had come to associate with specific directions. "Me, I call it the Old Crossroads. One o' the few big landmarks in the Expanse, very good for orientin' yerself. Find a wide enough bit o' grey road, you can follow it to here."

Battery's head hadn't moved, his eyes still fixated on the rubble strewn across the vale before him. "So the greyroads are everywhere?.. Where did they lead? Was this place... like this back then too?"

"Well, it wasn't. As far as I know, there used to be forests, even cliffs, an' lots of towns an' villages... It isn't called the Heartland for nothin', it was the core of Equestria. An' then... somethin' happened. No idea what, nopony I met could give me anythin' conclusive. But... if you look, most of old-time stuff is in the low places an' the hilltops are all bare an' tall things are all broken like those there supports you're starin' at, an' nothing but grass seems ta grow 'ere now, an' the water here makes ya feel funny if ye don't purify it with a magic kit first... Me, I think 'twas a magic catastrophe of some sort, leveled the entire place."

Battery turned to look at her as she spoke. Although he and Sunny were a few pony lengths apart, she could see the gleam in his eyes.

"And the Equestrians could do that? Could have something like that happen?"

"Well... look around, lad. Would we be standing 'ere now otherwise?" Sunny smirked.

"You know so much about the Equestrians... Of course you would, you have their coat of arms on the window," Battery smiled awkwardly. "S-sorry, I'm... not used to so much... or being out of Orange, at all... I mean to say, I'm..." Battery lowered his eyes bashfully, "I thank you for taking me in, for letting me see this with my own eyes... I hated it in Orange, and with you I can see the world, find out more about Equestria than the legends said..." He closed his eyes for a moment and smiled bashfully. "I hope I can repay you for this somehow."

Sunny felt the urge to pull up her hood and sat down on the roof plates to do so. "Eh, it's nothin'. It's nice to have a unicorn aboard, yer magic will help a whole lot. And yer skill at keepin' those ol' boxes o' scrap that passed for machinery in Orange up an' running will sure help me make the Vagabond better 'an it ever's been. We'll start with fixin' the ol' gun mount, no real opportunity to make a good livin' without goin' farther from Bastion an' into wilder areas. I'll show ye what needs to be done."

"Alright, Sunny... thanks," Battery said, looking at her with a kind of awkward stare that she had become so familiar with during the months of trading with Orange. She felt thankful that they were not standing face to face. "So... what do we do now?"

"Now... Now we need to gather some water an' purify it, that'll be yer job. There's a source close by. Then we eat, an' after that we find a place to conceal the Vagabond for the night. No need to rush, we wouldn't make it to Canterfall before night falls anyway, an' there're a few good spots for stoppin' 'round here. But right now..." Sunny smiled warmly, "Just take a break and enjoy the view, Battery."

"Thank you," the stallion said warmly. "Will you tell me more about... well, what you know of the past?"

"'Course I will, if you like. We're a team now, can't go travelin' together without good talk an' fun an' friendship. Now that you know all 'bout the Vagabond, it'll be a fine thing to talk of."

Battery smiled wider, looking happy, and turned back to gaze at the majestic vastness of the land and the timeworn ruins of the interchange lit up in warm yellows and oranges, likely trying to imagine how it all used to be.

Sunny, meanwhile, looked at the young unicorn himself. She thought back to Orange, to when she first met him; her status as the first outside visitor to come to that small and far-flung community in many years instantly gave her a flair of mystery and adventure and, together with her easygoing and approachable manner, her tales and the new and strange goods and gadgets she brought, it made her the star of the town, but this particular stallion stood out - he rarely left her side whenever she was there, never seemed to be out of questions about her, her travels and what she brought even when the novelty of her presence faded for others, and treated her with breathless, awed admiration. And Sunny couldn't brush aside the fact that she found this scrawny, unkempt, endearingly awkward, endlessly curious and thoughtful pony irrepressibly cute, or that she was tired of being alone and felt a sharp need for a permanent companion. Finding it too much to bear, she used part of her profits to buy as much new machinery as the Vagabond could carry in Bastion and bargained with the elders of Orange to give it all to them in return for letting her take Battery along; without the need to constantly fix the old and failing equipment, which was Battery's responsibility, they had no objections to her taking away a member they had no real use for otherwise, while Battery himself couldn't believe the news but agreed to leave immediately. Now, looking at the stallion below and ahead of her, Sunny smiled and blushed a little, thinking this has been the best deal in her entire life. It'd been two days since they left Orange, and everything was going nearly as she hoped and imagined it would. Her dream life was starting to become reality in the best way possible.

"It's... sad," Battery's voice reached her, pulling her out of the rosy-tinted fantasies of their immediate future she was slipping into. "The Equestrians not being here anymore, I mean. I wish I could see this place when they were still here. Now it's so... empty." The young unicorn sounded pensive.

"But beautiful too," Sunny said softly, just loud enough for Battery to hear.

"Yes... Empty, but beautiful. I'm... glad I can see all this with you. You're making my dreams come true."

Hearing the emotions in the stallion's voice, Sunny just nodded to herself and smiled absentmindedly, staring off into the distance, her thoughts and her cheeks becoming rosier still. Things were truly looking up for her at last.

And the above sheet o' words is why I haven't submitted this sketch for well over a week even though I meant to do it right away! It is as it always happens with me: the idea was to upload it the night before I went to the trip I'm writing this from, but then the usual whirl of events and distractions that sweeps you up during a vacation came into the equation. Plus, originally I intended to just make an atmospheric caption paragraph to this, but then I ended up thinking more about the characters and the setting and a week later - here we are, a flippin' mini-fanfic. And now you can see why exactly I stopped attempting to write any fics in addition to how much I fail at art! Dat disastrous pacing, dat horrible characterisation, dat sappy idea, dat disastrously written dialogue. And my overly big love for worldbuilding makes it a huge exposition bomb. Bleh. I'm sorry if you had to read it.

Oh well, it's not like most of ye will care much or even read this. Which is why I don't care either and just build things for my own amusement. If you don't like it, nothing's keeping ya.

I have to say that I'm strongly drawn to the concept of scavenging and repurposing random, unrelated things and items, particularly on a large scale, and turning things such as vehicles such as cars or trains, their wreckages and ruins and just collections of scrap into dwellings of various levels of sophistication. I love thinking which scrap plate or board or which salvaged object goes where and how to plot out a comfortable living space inside and on, say, a standard truck in order for it to be protected and comfortable both. Another little thing I love is improvised armoring and arming of vehicles that aren't built for a combat purpose. Both of these you can see here, in form of an old truck with an enclosed compartment made of welded and bolted-together plates of scrap metal and parts of other vehicles constructed on its chassis, made to be tough and at least resemble an APC. It is supposed to have armaments too, but the in-universe explanation of their absence is that the main gun had been destroyed and had to be removed, and its mounting point is currently hosting a higher-powered radar emitter and receiver. The drawing explanation is that I just ran out of time before I could design it. Others just aren't present yet, in this version.

I'm ashamed of how long it took me to do this sketch, and it isn't even complete yet. Funnily enough, it started off as just an attempt to draw something quickly, for a change from a bigger and more tiresomely detailed idea. But then I ended up trying to add detail and didn't manage to finish it in one day. It was sometime back in April... Since then I detailed it further, tried shading techniques that failed miserably and did several redraws of most parts. And about a week or two before the trip, I moved the whole thing from SAI to Photoshop and did a complete redrawing using the original version as a reference. Even so, every day I spent around 2 hours trying to draw, and most of that time, in turn, was being spent on procrastinating or being distracted, so the actual drawing time was just a few minutes refining or redoing this or that element. Then I decided to upload a version as it was before the trip, and so hurried to add crucial details I had been putting off, most importantly the ponies; the time I spent on the ponies was somewhere around 10 minutes of actual drawing for both.

As a final note to this already article-size description - yes, there'll be an improved version; the roughness of some lines is temporary (though one of the reasons I like the scrap aesthetic is that I can get away with my inability to do clean lines), the plates are supposed to have different tones or even colours and the grass and bridge and some other bits are placeholders and there should be a sky and some small but crucial details are still missing; and yes, I could've put canon ponies in there or not used anything pony at all and it would've worked just as fine or better, but 1) I want my pictures and the setting to be pony, so there, and 2) I don't see any canon pony in this idea, as I wasn't seeing it as an alternate postapocalyptic Equestria in the present day but rather far in the future, and I don't like seeing canon ponies in postapocalyptic or broken worlds anyway.

Wellp, here it is. Feel free to rip into it, but be reminded that I never intended this as an example of goodness nor do I see it as anything more than a practice sketch and a case of runaway worldbuilding (they're like pest plants sometimes, really).

P.S.: Mobile sta.sh seems to dislike html code for italics. I'll try to italicise the vehicle name later.