I: Reminiscence in Mexicolt
Knocking back her head, Trixie drained the last of her drink down her gullet, then magically brought the shot glass down onto the bar counter with a halfhearted slam; the stout glass gave an equally pathetic *plink* in reply.
“Another Rio Grande, Tendant!” she barked at the cool humid air around her. From across the sandalwood surface of the counter the bartender, a flinty gray mule with one twitching ear significantly longer than the other, glared at her but silently refilled the glass and slid it over to her before returning his attention to the Cantina’s other patrons.
Horn shimmering lightly, she lifted the little vessel up in front of her violet eyes, studying the wavering pinpricks of light from a globular ceiling lamp dance in the pale drink through the thick, clouded glass before bringing it to her lips.
In line with its rather misleadingly grandiose advertisement name, the ‘Rio Grande’ was many parts more plain water than even the admittedly weak sarsaparilla it was mixed with.
Yet, Trixie favored it for a number of reasons: first, due to its disproportionate content of water to proper stock, the Rio Grande cost next to nothing and was very hydrating, both of which were absolutely necessary in the murderous heat of her newest brutalizing residency. Second, because by some cruel happenstance, Trixie saw a lot of her self in that aqueous little drink; cheap, washed out and watered down, but with just enough kick to keep on going.
A bitter, shrill self-mocking laugh tittered from her throat, earning another baleful stare from the mule, which always seemed to pause in his work just to glare at her every time she moved. Here she was, at perhaps the very lowest, pitiful dregs of her travesty of a life, finding kinship with a drink! She chuckled at the sheer ignominy of her existence, stretching her neck and being rewarded a barrage of pops and cracks from her spine. She breathed deep, taking in the odors of sawdust, alcohol, and unwashed pony that pervaded the small bar.
She knocked back the rest of the thin liquor in a single swallow and with her magic, extracted a Bit from the rough cloth pouch hanging on her neck and dropped the shiny coin onto the bar, letting it thunk and clatter noisily onto the surface.
She stepped away from the counter, her hooves displacing the layer of musty hay strewn across the hardpack dirt floor, snatching up a dismally faded purple cape and wizard’s hat decorated with a matching night sky motif.
She draped the cloak over her shoulders, using a tendril of magical energy to fasten the collar with a simple brass pin made in the likeness of a star, and levitated the hat onto the crown of her head, the pointed tip jabbing out behind her.
Thusly attired, she moved towards the Cantina’s door, a solid rectangle of brightness contrasting the dimness of the bar’s interior. For a moment, Trixie was reminded of the warm feeling of a spotlight shining on her body in front of an enraptured audience. A mischievous shark’s grin spread across her face and she whirled around, facing the bar and the collection of rickety tables within its dim interior.
Rearing up on her hind legs so that the tip of her hat brushed the top of the doorway, she brandished her forelegs with a flourish. In a slightly inebriated version of her usual stage voice, she yelled “There is no greater company that an honest pony could ask for, than you; I hail thee, you grandly salt of th’ earth souls! Alas! Duty calls, compadres, and The Great and Powerful Trixie must leave your graceful presence. Hasta la vista! Until we meet again!” Several others of the cantina’s regular clientele seated within raised their drinks and bellowed equally enthusiastic and nonsensical benedictions, while others simply buried their muzzles deeper in their cups. Either way, few were surprised at what had become an all too common occurrence.
The Mule’s near omnipresent scowl had somehow deepened even further and his ears flattened against his head. Trixie dropped back down onto all fours and tossed her mane, done into a single thick braid, and laughed “Aw, come on Gris; you look more dour than a Hydra with a hernia!” The bartender simply turned his scowl elsewhere; swiping the coin off of the bar and into a pocket on the stained white apron hanging from his neck, busying himself and quietly muttering under his breath in Muleienne. For his exceedingly sour demeanor, Gris Tobillos knew that bits were bits, and wasn’t nearly so…Mulish, as to drive out a return customer on account of something as trivial as an overly boisterous personality.
Trixie quickly stuck out her tongue at the back of his head and turned away and trotted through the streaming sunlight of the doorway-and immediately snarled and wedged her eyes shut in the blinding afternoon sun. For a few moments, the world was a blinding, blurred, maelstrom of suffocating heat, churning noise and the rank smell of unwashed things
.
Her vision cleared, presenting all too clearly the dusty, crowded street outside of the Cantina. Typical of the endless network of Mexicolt City’s backstreets and alleys, the hard dirt path was lined on both sides by buildings of all shapes and material, faded by the beating sun. Jamming the limited space was a tide of tough looking mules and ponies in dusty clothing, numerous shady looking vendors cat calling painfully conspicuous tourists, and even one or two Antelope tribesmen spread throughout. To say it was uncomfortably tight going would be an elephantine understatement.
Stepping aside for another bar patron that stumbled out of the cantina with a half consumed salt lick clamped lovingly in his jaws, Trixie gazed longingly into the cool dark interior of the building for a few moments before setting off on a quick clip through the crowd along the street; it wasn’t as if the day would be getting any cooler.
The unicorn wove and dodged the other pedestrians and obstructions with a deftness that belied her outlander’s origins; a thought that occurred to the mare and her clopping footfalls faltered and turned perceptibly sullen as a bitter stream of memories arrived to remind her exactly why she was dodging dirty ponies on some dusty street in the desert. _____________________________________________________________________________________
Ponyville; a name, the mere inconsequential title of an equally irrelevant hamlet-a name branded forever to her memory with raging iron and sharp humiliation. It was just supposed to be just another stop on her tour of Equestria, another dainty town in which to spend a day or two, entertaining the simple-minded ponies within; to bask in their wonder and adoration as they showered her with applause and monetary gifts. Then leave she would depart, a few bits richer, and they given the pleasant diversion of her magical talents.
From the start the little town had been different. Though her arrival had brought the usual curiosity and interest, and summoned a large crowd of spectators, the reactions not long after her show’s beginning became less than favorable. She supposed she should have noticed the signs; did the ponies think her boasting unwarranted, her extravagance distasteful? They simply didn’t understand; in show business, supreme confidence and gusto were the unspoken law. The ponies that confronted her, were they not all convinced of their skill as well? Did they not just as readily affirm in their own superior talents? And yet, no outcry levied against them!
How could she have known that the two simpleton colts, just two more obsessive fans wishing to see The Great and Powerful Trixie in action, would actually be foolish enough to seek out an Ursa Minor and lead it into the town? Trixie had never actually vanquished an Ursa Major, anyone besides one of the Princesses who claimed so was a trough of staw; but for the most part, her talents were tried and true. She had attempted full heartedly to combat the beast, but her magic had been insufficient.
Twilight Sparkle…The name carved into her heart; the bane of her existence. The violet unicorn had played coy, unwilling to display her magical aptitude, even at Trixie’s baited showmare’s goading, then rushed in and played the unlikely hero. Her unexpected intervention of astounding talent had saved the little settlement, and the sky-blue mare’s life.
But now, many months later, Trixie had long ago realized she would have been better off slain by the Celestial Ursine. Her falsehood revealed, she had been forced to flee, bedraggled and possessing virtually nothing but her cloak and mage’s hat, with Ponyville’s jeers of derision following her flight.
But no matter, the Great and Powerful Trixie had started out with little, and if she had found success that time, then by Equus she could do it again!
She had trotted north, to Fillydelphia and had sought out the high class entertainment stable in which she had performed many times in the past. She had found the Head Manager and offered her services for the upcoming show. Instead of an enthusiastic hoof shake of approval, the mustachioed stallion had laughed in her face and told her to ‘go chase an Ursa’ and threw her out of the stable. Hurt and bewildered, she had realized word of the Ponyville fiasco had spread beyond the little town, even to Fillydelphia. Anywhere she ventured in the city, she was rejected and laughed at; infuriated, she moved on to find greener pastures.
Eastward, she forged to Hoofington, where the only audience that awaited her was a mob of spiteful ponies that gathered to mock and throw garbage at “Trixie, the Redoubtable Rabble-Rouser.” She had fled from the town, pursued by thrown stones and insults.
Indignant, but only slightly perturbed, Trixie had then contacted the Cloudsdale Entertainment Commission to apply for a slot in the side performances at the next Best Young Flyer’s Competition, a well paying job that she had taken a few seasons earlier. In reply she’d received a parchment that had been scribbled with a crude sketch of her fleeing in grossly exaggerated terror from the Ursa Minor.
Well, who needed those airhead Pegasi anyways? The Great and Powerful Trixie sure as straw didn’t! All she had to do was find an audience that could truly appreciate a real Showmare of her caliber; soon things would get better, and the whole ridiculous Ponyville incident would be nothing more than an unpleasant memory to be quickly forgotten.
But failure after failure continued to be the norm. It seemed that not only had her credibility been laid low, the name Trixie was mud. Lower than mud. At least a pony was willing to step on dirt.
Frustration piled up alongside frequent humiliation, and soon Trixie’s disquiet began to simmer into stinging resentment, and before long even that had enflamed into a terrible, almost manic desire for vengeance! She wanted nothing more than to march back to that pathetic blot on the countryside and tear it asunder in her fury, to crush Twilight Sparkle, and make her know what it was like to be despised, to be treated as lower than the soil.
But even in her thirst, she knew that by all practical definitions, she didn’t stand a chance against the unicorn prodigy. She needed something-anything-to give her a leg up on Sparkle. She sought for those means through many channels, some clandestine and questionable, and eventually came across rumor of a tremendously powerful, though obscure and reportedly dangerous, artifact of just that description.
She poured a massive quantity of her now endangered savings into wheedling the Alicorn Amulet from that fool of a shopkeeper, far more than any sensible pony should have ever considered, but blinded by the eager fire of possible vengeance, the wound to her bank account felt no more than a tickle to Trixie.
She was such a stupid, stupid foal! Upon returning to Ponyville, she got her petty vengeance, but the real defeat was again hers alone. Overtaken by the artefact’s influence and her own mania, she had become little more than a cruel despot, lording over the ponies and inflicting unnecessary suffering on the townsfolk. It was only through Sparkle’s sharp wit that she was freed from herself.
She was genuinely grateful for her lesson, and humbled, had made herself resolute to change her ways. The show was in her blood, bonded to her soul. She could not give that up, but she could certainly change her approach, and with time she knew that eventually she could show the true and better Trixie to the world.
But things didn’t get better, and nobody forgot about her deceit.
Everywhere she went, it seemed, word of her had spread. Ridicule and abuse became the norm; jeers and shouts and tossed debris greeted her coming and going: Seaddle, Detrot, Farmington, Norfoal; no matter where, without fail it was the same story. Damn that Twilight Sparkle and those gossipy Ponyville hicks, was there nowhere that her name still held a shred of credibility? She didn’t even bother the trek to Manehatten or Stalliongrad
In Detrot, she had been approached only by a grimy snake-eyed Griffon who offered her a position as a ‘Personal Consultant’ after placing a groping hand on her flank. He’d received a magical hail of bricks for his trouble and she had left the city disgusted and with wavering resolve.
She fared little better in any number of the other small towns and villages dotting the land; even if her pride would have allowed her to seek employment in menial labor, it would have been a largely hopeless endeavor, now that word of her tyrannical streak was spreading throughout the Kingdom.
Had she the inclination, Trixie might have laughed as she walked: for all of the emphasis she had placed on building her reputation, that it would be the cause of her downfall was a bitter pill to swallow.
Her morale plummeted and confidence failing, her situation began to become desperate. Trixie had had the foresight to place savings in a bank account, but after months of expenses and only minimal income, those reserves began to run out at a dangerous rate. She began to thin out, her expertly maintained appearance degrading in the necessity of ever more frugal budgeting. Starvation was unlikely, but inexorably, the possibility of inescapable poverty loomed ever closer.
In a final gambit, she’d drawn from the last scraps of her savings and purchased a Train ticket to the Frontier Territories, her final hope for finding anywhere that hadn’t heard about the disaster that was Trixie’s life.
She’d barely stepped off of the train at her destination, a farming community called Appleloosa, before a crowd of angry cowponies and their sheriff surrounded her and made it very clear that they “Didn’t want some no-good fraud and her corruptin’ influence causing ruckus in their town.” Apparently, the orange hayseed filly who had called her out in Ponyville had extended family in this town as well. Oops.
That had been the breaking point. Trixie thought to herself as she waited at a clogged intersection; the sun was beating down on her full force now, and the combination of her brisk pace and the heat had long burned away any diversion provided by what little sarsaparilla that had been in her system, leaving her with nothing but the totality of her discomfort.
There in that little Apple obsessed track of dirt, Trixie found her rock bottom. All of her churlish pride, even what she was fairly warranted to feel, was swept away by the crushing realization of what she had become: an utter laughing stock; hated, scorned by the ones she spent her life seeking to impress. Her drive, her passion, even the haughty pride that had marked who she was for years, swept away by a crushing depression that blotted out everything so completely that she could not even remember that entire period of her life. She became a wanderer without destination, reduced to a brittle shell of what she had been.
It had been here in Mexicolt city that she eventually arrived. Even to this day she wasn’t sure exactly how long the all-consuming haze of despair that came at Appleloosa lasted, or what events transpired within, nor how she managed to drift this far south; one day, she was simply there.
It had been sudden, like waking from a dreamless sleep. She was in the midst of some sort of vast courtyard, made of bone-white stone and strange pale brick. Before her, on the far side of the place was a magnificent tiered white building with a pole on which flapped the Banner of Equestria. To her sides and behind, the courtyard was enclosed by a short wall of the yellow brick, lined by rows of tough but beautiful looking plants. A number of intricately carved fountains dotted the yard, spouting shimmering crystal water into the air.
Then she had noticed the people. All around her, hooves clicking on the stone as they walked, clustered around the fountains, dipping and splashing the water, streaming in and out from the arched gateways in the way and the huge building; everywhere. Like a dull roar, her ears registered the noise of it, a cacophony of voices and hoofsteps.
She had been afraid, and braced for the jeers and spiteful projectiles that she had grown accustomed to. They never came. All around Trixie were hundreds of ponies, none of which seemed to recognize her, or even notice her presence. The sun instantly became hotter and brighter than she could ever remember, and slowly, mechanically, still wary of the angry mobbing she was certain would come, she moved to one of the fountains, an inescapable thirst driving her to not care whether it was safe to drink.
In that water she saw her own tremulous reflection. Mane dusty and ratted, a sun bleached hat and cloak barely hanging onto her frame, a gaunt face with hollow eyes staring sightlessly back at her.
Then, next to the nightmarish image in the water, she saw a flash of fantastic color and heard an excited murmuring from behind her. Turning her head slowly, numbly, towards the source of the sound and colors, she saw a gray unicorn stallion, standing on a pile of crates surrounded by a crowd of other ponies. The unicorn’s horn flashed and sparkled, sending out waves of beautiful conjured apparitions as the observers laughed and clapped at the display.
At that moment, she had been overcome with a desire that overshadowed every other thought in her mind, a crippling need to emulate that gray unicorn; to use her magic.
No longer caring if she was ridiculed or called fraud, she had sent a burst of magic, with all of her strength poured into it, into the air. There, hovering above her head was a great golden star, pulsing with fiery orange and crimson. A rain of sparks poured from her creation, falling into the water of the fountain, hissing and spitting on contact.
She had simply stared at it, fixated by its beauty, the perfection of something wrought by her power, eyes glued to where it had been even after if had fizzled out of existence, then noticed that she too was surrounded by a small crowd, all of which were looking at her.
She had flinched and ducked her head, not noticing her hat fall, and waited for the sting of words and hateful missiles; when they never came, she had become confused, but dared not look at the watching ponies.
Then she’d heard a quiet clinking at her hooves, and when she chanced to look, she was dumbfounded to see a small number of Bits glinting at the bottom of her fallen hat. Mystified, she had looked up at the group; to her surprise, they were smiling at her, and their faces were curious, anticipating.
It had taken a moment for her damaged mind to comprehend it, but then she realized why: they had seen her magic, and they had liked it. No jeers or flung stones in her direction; just regular Equestrians watching a performance… her performance. And they liked it!
Timidly, she’d released more magic, creating a simple illusion that wavered over the watching ponies before exploding in a spray of harmless rainbow shards in their direction. The effect was immediate. Their smiles had widened a few even clopped their hooves together happily at the display.
Like a geyser bursting forth, she had felt her old self flood back. Filled with the joy she hadn’t felt since Ponyville, she had started gleefully running though her old repertoire, exhaustion totally forgotten, to the delight and cheers of the ponies of this new city.
After what had felt like an entire lifetime of searching, after nearly loosing all hope, she had found her sanctuary; the somewhere that she would be able to practice the craft she loved, without fear of her past. The Great and Powerful Trixie had well and truly died; but that didn’t mean Trixie the Unicorn could not start anew.
She had found her second chance.
It was through one of the many entrances to the city’s grand plaza that Trixie now trotted, her lengthy reverie giving her a blessed, if not glum, distraction during her journey in the heat. As she stepped into the grand white expanse of the plaza, she felt a sense of pleasant familiarity.
The sheer white of the plaza was as always packed with the great assortment of faces and the multitudes of cosmopolitan noise were nearly identical to every other day she came. The great tiered form of Mexicolt City’s Administory, the workplace and residence of Anillo de Oro, the Lord-Governor of the Great Southern Plateau districts, was just as majestic and dignified as ever. Standing out from the rest of the crowd, the imposing forms of ponies and mules of the City Constabulary stood vigilant watch over the plaza, muscular bodies burdened with bulky combat harnesses and expressions completely stoic as they roasted alive in their matte black and green uniforms. Interspaced even more sparsely, and much more distinctive in their appearance, were the magicians and other street performers; her fellow entertainers and mendicants.
It was here in the Grand Plaza that she had been earning her living for the past month and a half; it had been her lifeline and the Bits she earned here, however measly the amount compared to her earnings as the Great and Powerful Trixie, had allowed her to live a frugal, but sufficient existence.
Moving past the crowds of tourists and locals, Trixie homed in on her territory. Technically speaking, none of the entertainers here owned anything; it was only because the guards tolerated them that they could even seek to turn a profit in the plaza, but every successful showpony carved out a piece of ‘turf’ that they would call their own, not too far from the best audiences, but steering clear of another’s stage area.
Trixie was more talented and had better presentation than most, and therefore was more successful than most in the plaza; so she had centered her claim at the fountain where she had first performed the day she arrived in Mexicolt City. It was an axiom of the business that the fountains often drew the largest and most generous portions of the crowds.
And today they seem to be especially large, she thought to herself with a thin, but genuine smile. She knew that the number of visitors to this part of the city was under constant fluctuation, and the schedule that dictated when a family would take a summer vacation, or a pony would come south to visit distant relatives was fickle and unpredictable. Therefore it was critical for her to rake in a many Bits as possible during times of rich pickings, in order to survive the leaner seasons.
It was therefore a shock that when Trixie came near enough to the fountain to see the center of the crowd, she saw a bright cherry-red unicorn colt gesturing dramatically to the crowd around him that had their attention fixed upon him.
By the awed sounds the spectators, it was clear that the unicorn had been performing street magic-on her turf.
A maelstrom of negative emotions exploded in her mind. She was furious that some upstart hack was in her spot, cutting out of her income, and most importantly-though it didn’t actually occur to her- that they were directing their admiration at someone other than her!
With a snarl she began to barge through the crowd, shoving and growling most ungracefully, towards the center and the object of her rage. Her passage elicited a stream of curses and sounds of indignation from the Equestrians she pushed, stepped on, or outright flattened; in retrospect, such rash action would probably damage her reputation, but at the moment she could have hardly cared less.
She broke the innermost walls of the circle of the crowd and stormed up to the offending magician, who now wore an expression of uttermost shock, and jutted her face outward until it was but several inches from the tip of his nose.
“What in the Sorrel Hells do you think you are doing!?” she bellowed, unleashing a verbal bomb at point blank range on him.
The unicorn, which was a good head naturally taller than Trixie, blinked. “Um…Magic?” he said meekly, before his red furred lips split into a silly grin.
For a moment it was Trixie’s turn to be dumbfounded; then her indignant rage flooded back even more intensely. Had he just dared mock the Great and Powerful Trixie? Her horn began to charge up with shimmering light-a magical storm of detritus directed at the upstart was looking to be a very attractive option.
Before she could open up with any form of retribution, the unicorn began talking again, taking as step backward and looking around at the fountain. “This is your zone? I’ve never seen you around here before.” His voice, when producing multiple words at once, was clear and articulately even, as though he had days to rehearse his sentences before speaking them.
She harrumphed. “Then you must have eyesight as poor as your sideshow tricks to not notice the Great and powerful Trixie!” she realized that she had just sounded painfully similar to her old self, and involuntarily winced as bitter memories stung her mind’s eye.
The Unicorn for his part was nonplussed; instead he simply cocked his head as though perplexed. “Well, since we’re starting out with introductions, I’m Prospero, the Humble and Reticent.”
This made Trixie halt full stop. This Prospero had taken the use of her haughty title and thrown it back into her face, all while using that polite, gentle voice. He had made it sound like he was giving his own official title.
She didn’t have a comeback, and simply looked at him, feeling the eyes of the remaining crowd on her back. Prospero shuffled his hooves awkwardly “I really am sorry, by the way; I didn’t realize that I was infringing.” He looked around and his demeanor changed, brightening. “Well, seeing as the time is what it is, how about we have lunch, on me?” He said airily.
Trixie couldn’t believe her ears. First this stallion stole her spot, her money and the adoration of her audiences, but now he had the gall to ask her out to lunch? Her lips bent into a sneer and she began to formulate another tirade that would put her initial outburst to shame.
But before she could do so much as utter a single syllable, Prospero had bent down, putting his head close to hers, in a low urgent whisper he said “Either way, it would probably be in both our best interests to vacate the premises.” He jerked his head to their left.
Despite her annoyance, Trixie glanced at the direction he had indicated. Apparently, her little confrontation had attracted more attention than she had counted on. Through the gaps in the rapidly dispersing crowd around them, she saw the very large shape of a particularly large mule Constabulary Officer in a very dangerous looking Assault Harness stalking towards them. His un-helmeted face was graced with a spectacularly familiar scowl to match his rugged bulk.
Trixie briefly considered staying and asking the guard if he was related to a Gris Tobillos, but quickly decided otherwise and decided that it would indeed be wise to beat a hasty retreat.
She turned her head back to where Prospero had been and saw him, having donned a dusty cloak and was now speedily fastening a clinking cloth bag on a chain around his neck before looking back at her. “Well?” he asked and slipped into the churning mass of Equestrians.
“Just because you owe me!” she called at his rapidly vanishing tail, before adjusting her hat and charging into the sea of Ponies after the red show stealing unicorn.
Author's Note
Goofed with the formatting, here ya go.
