“Greetings, I represent the Brookside Firefighting and Insurance company” the mare in front said, not even bothering with giving her name. Their grey uniforms, barely-concealed weapons, and with what Sullen Hoof had told the circle of ‘insurance’ scams and protection money rackets, didn’t leave much to the imagination with regards to the intention of these three ponies.

Shimmer stepped up to the counter and leaned in over it: “We’re not buying – now unless one of you is hurt, beat it”
The mare pulled out a stogie from her grey jacket. The other mare in the trio whipped out a small tinder-box full of embers, lighting the stogie for what looked to be her superior. With a few puffs the mare in charge blew a plume of foul-smelling smoke towards Speaker and Shimmer: “We offer a very serious service. Here in Firewander you have to be careful, so you would do wisely to listen to our offer – anything less would be rude, and Brookside doesn’t like rude business owners – even for charity cases like this”

Shimmer would have leapt over the counter if Speaker hadn’t raised a hoof: “We’re not buying – now beat it”

“You know, I get that you’re trying to help the ponies here, but you’re not doing them that much of a favor… most of the ponies here pray for the day they die so they can end their misery. You’re just prolonging that by doing this” the mare haughtily stated, parading around the waiting room, looking at the chairs as if to assess what they could be sold for.

“Shimmer, entertain her escorts” Speakers stated as he stepped out from behind the counter and slowly trotted towards the ‘insurances sales’ mare with a slow but determined pace.

The mare didn’t find Speaker’s show of defiance very impressive. She had talked down far more intimidating ponies in the past – indeed by her reckoning she’d seen it all, and made them all pay their dues. It was a carefully rehearsed speech, indeed she didn’t even need to look at Speaker while reciting it as she strutted around as if she owned the place: “Listen, what we’re asking for isn’t unreasonable – and the service we provide is quite legit: You pay us fifteen to twenty percent of your intake, on a weekly basis, based on what services you require, and we keep trouble away from your little clinic here and compensate if something does happen. We cover everything from graffiti, property damage, loiterers. So, what do you… uh”

The mare finally looked at Speaker. Her two escorts weren’t there anymore, neither was the grey-coated nurse, and the door to the street was open… and Speaker didn’t look the least bit intimidated: “…think”

With a firm hoof and martial skills far superior to the back-alley brawling that the mare knew, Speaker quickly grasped her and threw her up against the wall: “You listen here you little shit. I’ve barely been in Nexus for two days, and all I’ve heard is doom and gloom about how horrible it is, how ponies are exploited left and right, how everyone and their cat pays protection money… but that ends here: If you or your thugs come back here again without any pressing need for medical assistance – then you will quickly need some”

“Do you have any idea who you’re messing with here? I’m with the Grey Collection Agency, you don’t want to mess with us!” the mare said as she struggled against Speaker’s iron grib.

Speaker took a deep breath and sighed: “You were one the one who came tomes with me – I’m simply making you leave”
The grey-jacketed mare was summarily tossed out into the street where she landed in a neat pile on top of her two unconscious escorts, next to Shimmer who appeared to have been expecting such a turn of events.

Speaker and Shimmer returned to their spots behind the counter and began to receive curious customers, most of which wondered what the fight had been about.

At the end of the day Speaker was beaming, and Shimmer was relishing in Speaker’s good mood. Together they had helped several dozen ponies with everything from tooth-aches, limbs that had been broken which had grown together wrongly, a host of various diseases – and indeed, a rather hesitant mutant pony who had wondered if Speaker’s magic could cure her.

The mutant pony, under her cloak of burlap and sack cloth, had been without any disernable coat – instead she had a blue and redish skin of slime, which made a mess on the floor as it trailed goo behind her. Her hooves were bulbous and misshaped, strange feelers protruded from her forehead, she didn’t even have a visible cutie mark anymore – but one shot with the unshaping gun and she was a plain cream coated mare with a curly red mane and a cutie mark resembling a cooking pot and a heart. Her elation was beyond anything Speaker had ever seen – not even the celebrations in Chung Do following the cure of the plague had been this intense and heartfelt.

“I wish we get more customers like her” Speaker idly mused. Shimmer nodded in a most pleased fashion as she swept up the slime-trail that the no-longer mutant mare had left behind upon entry.

That evening the circle discussed the Grey Collection Agency – both Sullen Hoof and Cash Charmer had apparently heard of them. Sully confirmed that the GCA was a run of the mill protection racket focused gang, but added that the other services the mare had listed were quite legit: “They will keep thieves and hoodlums away from the shop – but if you don’t pay them you go on the local list”

“List?” Speaker wondered as he slurped up Sullen Hoof’s wondrously spiced noodles.

Cash explained that it was considered best practice among nearly all the mercenary outfits in the city who dabbled in policing gigs to have a list posted at certain central spots in the city – the list was of the shops and landlords who weren’t paying protection money.

“So it’s basically a go-to list for thieves and stuff? That’s ridiculous!” Shimmer burst out – finding such a practice extremely inappropriate.

“Can’t we accuse these grey-farts of breaking that dogma, what’s the one, the inhibiting trade thing, by inviting others to rob us?” Red suggested, sounding keen on trying to use Nexus’ own twisted laws against it.

Sullen Hoof shook his head: “First of all, the clinic is a charity in all but name – Nexus doesn’t recognize that as legitimate business, so there’s no trade to inhibit – second, then the GCA is a legit business, even if it’s an exploitative one.
Firewander isn’t patrolled by mercs in the same way the rest of Nexus is: They only patrol the main roads by contract with the council, to prevent changelings from entering the rest of Nexus – the rest of Firewander is at the mercy of gangs and operations like the GCA, who lord over most of Brookside”

Speaker sighed: “So… if we earn a profit – then they have to leave us alone?”

“If only it was that simply – but then we could hire mercs to guard the clinic, which would probably be cheaper – even with the higher rates for gigs in Firewander” Cash noted.

Speaker was finding all this talk of business very depressing – he longed to return to his clinic.

The next day Speaker and Shimmer returned to find three things waiting for them at the clinic: A group of hideous mutant ponies, all extremely hopeful to be returned to normal – well, except the screaming wails of one of the mutant’s second mouth (which was on the pony’s belly), which kept yelling obscenities at Speaker until the unshaping gun silenced it forever. It deeply saddened Speaker to have to turn the other ponies away – but he told to come back the next day, when the pattern rectifier would have recharged.
'
The second thing Speaker and Shimmer found was an invoice from the GCA nailed to their front door – on it was written, in no uncertain terms, that failure to pay the listed dues would result in the clinic appearing on the ‘bad payer list’. Speaker took no heed to this, although Shimmer suggested that she stay the night in the clinic to keep watch…

The third thing the two found – once they finally inside the shop – was a hole in the stone floor. Someone had tunneled in through the floor over night and had stolen the wooden chairs in the waiting room and even the woven mat in the treatment room. While this was of course deeply troubling, then these lost items were not of any real value – plus Shimmer said that she could smell the scent of the thieves, so she asked to go hunting for them – Speaker obliged the Lunar as he recalled his singing staff and played a little tune to make the rocky floor seal itself and usher forth a series of stone chairs and benches – he could buy blankets and seat covers later, maybe when Shimmer returned.

The rest of the day proceeded relatively uneventfully – dozens more ponies came by, the pail for rocks and pebbles soon found itself nearly half-full, and Shimmer returned a short while before Speaker closed the clinic for the day with a big purse full of silver: “Compensation for stolen property and floor repair”

“You didn’t kill any of them?” Speaker wondered, Shimmer’s predatory glee giving him a worried feeling.

Shimmer shook her head: “Didn’t have to – burglars aren’t brawlers – but hey, did you know that there is like a ton of first ages ruins under the streets here?”

That didn’t just get Speaker’s attention – that completely stole it, to the point that the mare with the bum leg he was treating felt sufficiently ignored to speak up about it: “Hey!”

Speaker quickly gave the mare a quick swat on the flank – instantly and quite magically curing the disease which had been eating away at the mare’s hip joints – then he sent her on her way even faster. Turning to Shimmer, Speaker stared at her intently: “Tell me everything!”

It turned out that while Shimmer had been hunting the burglars, tracking their scent through the hole in the floor, she had come across quite a few first age ruins – all of them picked clean from centuries of hopeful treasure hunters – but after shaking down the burglars she had checked in Sullen Hoof, then at the city library near the big park in Manehattan: “…and you won’t believe the entrance fee you have to pay to get in there – I’m surprised there were any scholars poking around in there at all”

“Doesn’t surprise me, but what did you find?” Speaker inquired, most curious.

With a smirk, Shimmer simply said: “Nothing – the few books they have on first age stuff aren’t available unless you pay a huge security deposit… and I didn’t feel like parting with one of the Denansdor jade talents”

“They charge that much to let you read books about the first age? Wow” Speaker said in surprise, sitting down in one the stone-benches he had music’d up earlier – darn things really needed some soft blankets or cushions.

Nodding, Shimmer flicked her tail about in frustration as she sat down next to Speaker: “Ya, the library was a bust – but on my way out I got chatty with a scholar who was having the same problems, some traveling purple unicorn mare from the realm, Clover the something something – anyway, she said that Firewander was once known as Hollow – that ring any… bells?”

Speaker looked as if he’d seen a ghost. Oh he knew Hollow quite well… it had been one of the places he’d sought refuge when the usurpation had taken place – and he had found no sanctuary there, only more hostile dragonblooded unicorns already burying their dead solar masters in five horrid tombs around the hills of Hollow.

“Hello?” Shimmer waved a hoof in front of Speaker’s face – but he was lost in thought and ancient memories.

Eventually Speaker snapped out of his memory fugue, at which point Shimmer noted that pretty much all of the accessible ruins had been picked clean – if not outright dismantled – with only the few dozen towers and other surface-level first age buildings that dot Nexus still being in use.

“Ya, and we’ve seen how they’ve mangled the light-rail system…” Speaker said, sighing heavily: “It’s like Nexus sucks everything good out of anything that comes here, then bottles it and sells it back to you at twice the price – or tries to force you to do that yourself”

Cuddling up to Speaker, Shimmer comforted the Solar by pointing out that the good they were doing would doubtlessly help fix at least the local area.

Standing up abruptly, leaving Shimmer to fall over on the stone bench, Speaker drew a deep breath with renewed vigor and sense of purpose: “You’re right – and I know just how to help fix the place up, but we need to do something about the changelings and the wyldfire first”

“Sounds good to me, what’s the plan?” Shimmer said, nursing the bump on her head.

Shrugging, Speaker admitted that he had no idea – the source of the wyldfire would have to be uncovered first, although he was certain that if that could be deactivated, stopped or just moved out of the city and perhaps chucked back into the wyld then the changelings would thin out as well.

That evening, as the circle reconvened at the town house in Nexus district to rejoice at another of Cash’s culinary masterpieces, Speaker and Shimmer told the circle of what they knew. To the pair’s surprise the rest of the circle knew full well of Nexus’s past as a first age city – the city of Hollow.

“You make it sound like it is some kind of unheard of feat – Lookshy, most of the realm, most larger cities in the south and the north; they’re all built on the ruins of the first age” Sunrise noted without much care in her voice.

Cash was less dour about the revelation, but pointed out that it well known that scavengers, treasure hunters and even construction companies had picked the remains of Hollow centuries ago – to the point that some parts of Firewander occasionally would collapse or cave in from having barely any actual foundation, beyond the shell built on top of the ruins beneath.

Sullen Hoof confirmed what Cash said: “It gets really bad every year when the spring thaw really hits Nexus, the yellow and grey river both flood and basically wash away most of the lower lying neighborhoods – as well as some parts of Firewander’s underground. The wyld energies there are too powerful, and the changelings too numerous, for any ponies to safely go down and fix the damages”

“All the more reason to get rid of this wyldfire thing then” Speaker resolutely noted, sounding none too pleased that a mercantile power as forceful as Nexus hadn’t managed to do something on its own in over seven hundred years.

Shimmer put her chopsticks down: “Hey, I’ve heard of dozens of Lunars who’ve braved the wildfire – not that many have come out alive, and those who did all bore marks from it – but don’t think that the ponies aren’t doing anything. Yesterday when looking around for those burglars I saw several dozen mercs on the streets in Firewander, decked out with iron weapons and iron barding, much of it with that wyld sizzle you get after touching it to changeling glamour – so the ponies here do fight the changelings and even keep them at bay. For mortal forces to pull that off for seven centuries, that’s impressive”

“Perhaps, but Lookshy could probably have come up with a better and more permanent solution far sooner” Speaker counterpointed, not entirely pleased that Shimmer wasn’t just siding with him on the issue.

The Lunar gave Speaker an accusatory look: “And so might the realm, but both those options would mean giving up the freedom that ponies here have to make their own fortunes”

“I can’t believe you’re saying that – you’ve seen what that ‘freedom’ affords the ponies that eke out a living in Firewander! This place needs some proper oversight, badly” Speaker adamantly implored. Sullen Hoof nodded, but Shimmer seemed to remain firm in her beliefs.

Drawing in a sharp breath, as if to quickly say something, Shimmer paused as she was overpowered by her exaltation’s link to Speaker – she simply couldn’t reject his point of view, even if as a Lunar she was very much a fan of the idea of survival of the fittest, the most shrewd and those who best adapt to difficult living conditions. Still, she tried to rationalize her forced change of heart: “I… you’re right – plus the guild sells thousands of pony slaves every year to the changelings at the amber post, that’s exploitation on a level that even I can’t accept. Reigning in the guild and Nexus wouldn’t be that bad idea, but not too much either”

Thinking for a moment, Cash found himself struck with an inspired thought so profound that he felt that he simply had to share it. The rest of the circle mainly just noticed the peas rolling out of Cash’s mouth, back into his bowl: “Tell you what – the guild would be a lot easier to reign in if they couldn’t oppress their workers here so effectively. If the working ponies of Nexus unionized they could influence the guild far more effectively”

“No chance – labor unions, and even the mention of that kind of things in public, are forbidden in Nexus” Sullen Hoof noted, his voice quite overtly revealing his very negative opinion of that fact.

“By dogma or civility?” Cash asked Sullen hoof.

“Civility – but good luck trying to find a council member who’ll overrule that one – it’ll be reinstated so quickly you wouldn’t know it had been gone” Sullen Hoof said, followed by a sigh.

Cash didn’t seem deterred: “Well that would be a problem, but say, does the emissary ever issue any civilities himself?”
There weren’t many stories of the Emmisary issuing civilities – but there were one or two that he could remember, although Sullen Hoof had to admit that even if they were true then he had no idea of the circumstances of such abnormal events. Cash suggested that he and Sullen Hoof investigate that the next day.

The next few days came and went relatively uneventfully for Speaker and Shimmer – the only thing of note that really happened was a rather worrying development taking place outside of the clinic: First it was gangs of mutant ponies who started trying to control who got enter the clinic, basically charging for admittance for other mutants out front – and their prices were steep. Shimmer dealt with them quickly, but the damage had been done and the precedent had been established. After that the Grey Collection Agency started pulling the same thing, almost putting up barricades around the clinic and then charging the hopeful, the desperate and the very ill for what Speaker was giving away for free.

Red suggested a direct assault on the GCA headquarters, but Cash said that doing so would be just as likely end up making things more difficult than need be – especially since the GSA employed Night Arrow mercs to guard their properties…

“And these Night Arrows are to be feared? We’re solars, come on – they’re only mortals” Shimmer said in a bemused tone.
Clearing her throat, Red took command of the conversation: “The Night Arrows are the most popular and well-liked mercenary outfit in Nexus, because they patrol the public parks – plus they give the best entrainment: They are the guild’s and the council’s go-to mercs for public executions of prisoners. If we mess with them we’re messing with some very well liked ponies”

Pouting, Shimmer leaned over onto Speaker’s shoulder. Speaker couldn’t help but think that for a pony who’s supposedly a hundred years old, then she sure didn’t act it from time to time. Of course, what Speaker didn’t know was that Shimmer based her ‘hundred years’ on time also spent in the wyld – in narratives and under conditions that weren’t entirely synchronous to Creation...

Ultimately Cash suggested that Speaker and Shimmer try to wait it out – the GCA needed to realize that there weren’t any money to get from the clinic. The problem was that doing so wasn’t much of an option: Even with the mutant gangs, or the GCA trying to profit off the clinic-going ponies, then enough were showing up that Speaker was running out of essence several times during the day, as he used a lot of essence to speed up his treatments to handle everything, so he could work faster and cover the full patient load nobody would have to leave without getting treated.

“I don’t see the problem” Cash noted. Sure, he could recognize that it meant that Speaker was working really hard and servicing a ton of ponies, but any pony selling anything would have to slow down his business if couldn’t meet the demand, or… expand, which it then occurred to Cash that Speaker wanted to.

“The main problem is recovery – almost half the essence I use is to ease and speed the recovery of the ponies I’ve treated. With the four stories of the clinic building, we have plenty of room we don’t use to have patients stay and remain under observation as they recover normally – but that’ll need nurses, orderlies, actual medical supplies since I am currently using my own essence as everything from bandages to medication” Speaker explained, Cash nodding slowly.

The problem with such an expansion of the clinic, in the face of the GCA wanting money from the clinic, was that it would clearly demonstrate that the clinic had money to spend on salaries, supplies and furniture. Of course, Nexus’s civilities did offer solutions – but it was all solutions that required spending even more money: “The only way to keep them from camping in front of the clinic and charging for your help would be to buy the whole block, since that’d give me control of the road outside it…”

“Then do that, please – I don’t want the emissary knocking down our door for beating up grey-coats, but if they keep this up I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop myself – they just won’t stop trying to extort money from us” Speaker implored.

A deep frown gathered on Cash’s face, like a storm brewing: “I could do that – but it would have to be done very quickly once I start it, since the asking prices for the properties will go up very quickly once word spreads of what we’re doing. Secondly, I honestly don’t see how an investment like that could ever pay off… but…”

Seeing the frown turn into a devious and gleeful expression, like that of a predator ready to pounce its prey, the rest of the circle leaned in to hear what Cash was saying – especially Speaker and Shimmer: “Speaker, could you and Shimmer could find a way to clean up that part of Brookside? I’m not saying go and stop the wyldfire permanently, but if you can find a way to at least locally clean the area of wyld energy so it’d be safe to live and work there I could open up any number of business there… I just need something to use the properties there for”

“You know Cash, I’ve actually been thinking on doing some experiments to that end – just to see how the wyld energy of Firewander works – I’ll get back to you on that as soon as I have anything to tell” Speaker said enthusiastically.

Over the next few days Shimmer caught Speaker increasingly doing strange gestures up against the walls of the clinic whenever she was fetching new patients – and one day when she came into the treatment room with a frail looking wretch of a pony - a stallion with a worn face, one that spoke of a life mired in occasional bouts of violence and daily exhaustive physical labor – Shimmer found Speaker wearing that strange mechanical hoof-device that Sunrise had fetched from the outskirts of Denansdor just before they left that horrible place.

“Ok, what’s with the gizmo?” Shimmer said, ushering the frail pony into the room and onto the examination table.

Speaker beamed with pride as he struck the ground hard with the clockwork hoof device: multiple tiny pistons and tubes of irridecent fluid springing to life, emitting a mystic pattern of golden essence that seemed to fade into the air and ground around him. Shimmer instantly felt it. As a Lunar she was very much able to sense ambient wyld energies, a crucial skill if living in the outskirts of reality, but at that very moment she felt absolutely no wyld energies, only the serene calm of reality’s stability in the air: “What did… how?”

“One of the oldest wards the solars deviced – the chaos repelling pattern. No changeling, demon or stranger thing can bend reality around me when I have this working” Speaker said proudly.

“An island of stability… Oh this is perfect, can you make it into a permanent ward for the clinic, or the whole district?” Shimmer wondered, her thoughts running amok with the potential of such a powerful ward – truly, a charm that made solars worthy of the sobriquet of Lawgiver: They could enforce even the heavenly laws of reality.

Looking at the seemingly pulsating machine wrapped around his right fore-hood, Speaker frowned ever so slightly: “No, and the ward only works for a couple of yards around me – but now that I know how to stabilize and manipulate wyld energies on a basic level I can start working on much more advanced techniques that reshape wyld energies”

“Uhm… not to interrupt, but Buck-eye Joe down at the lawless front said that if I gave you two a rock you could help me out…” the emaciated stallion on the examination table blunty stated.

Speaker smiled at the stallion and gave him a brief glance, his eyes flashing gold for a split second: “Three badly set broken ribs, early onset of arthritis in the shoulders and hooves – probably from carrying heavy loads – malnutrition, slight scurvy, rotten teeth all around, skin-parasites in all the usual places, irritation of the bowels – probably linked to the malnutrition and parasites – did I miss anything?”

The stallion’s tired eyes lit up in a mix of surprise and awe – a reaction that Speaker at this point was quite used to when he had properly diagnosed a patient. The stallion didn’t even get to say anything, as Speaker quickly hit the patient with his anesthetic charm, the weakened pony falling unconscious instantly.

Smiling, Shimmer took a light breath and rearranged the patient so Speaker could work his magic: “So… what do we do now?”

Speaker knew that his Lunar mate was talking about the wyld energies and the techniques and charms he’d mentioned – but right now his focus was elsewhere, so with a smirk and a coyly raised eyebrow he simply stated: “We practice medicine”

From outside the clinic the flashes of golden and silver light that came from Speaker’s and Shimmer’s healing and flesh-manipulating charms made many a curious pony turn and look as they trotted past, but the locals had gotten used to the lights from the healing house, so they paid it little heed – merely smiling as they knew that it meant that another pony was getting a new chance at life.

Informing the circle of the development, Cash congratulated Speaker and pointed out that he had always been sure that Speaker would find a solution to the wyld taint of Brookside. Speaker added that it would require at least a few weeks of intensive meditation, training and practice to fully master the wyld shaping techniques he had begun to remember from his past life – but once he understood them he could start siphoning off wyld energy form Brookside to see how the ambient wyld energy levels reacted.

“Do you really think it’ll help?” Sullen Hoof inquired curiously.

Smiling to the melty face that was Sullen Hoof and his burn-scars, Speaker nodded: “In the first age the solar host quite literally stabilized the wyld around creation to the point that we expanded the size of Creation tenfold, if not more. Creation back then was impossibly vast… so trust me, I can stabilize this, the only question is how I have to do it. By the way, come by the clinic one of these days… you said I could have a go at your face once you got your mask back”

Sullen Hoof nodded, but before he could answer Cash spoke: “I would suggest you keep the clinic closed until you have stabilized the area and allowed for the business expansion – you will probably also need to train your nurses and whatnot as well – spend the time training, and just do house-calls if you want to keep working as well… in fact I have a few potential costumers lined up if you’re up some concierge medicine”

After explaining what concierge medicine was – the service of being an on-call private doctor for the rich – Speaker at first rejected the idea: “I treat ponies – I don’t pamper them. Plus, if I have to be on call for whenever some guild factor has the sniffles I won’t be able to help the ponies who really need my help – it’d a pain, no a royal pain to have to run back and forth across Nexus for that”

Cash retorted that it would be more than possible to set up service contracts where checkups had to be booked in advance: “Plus, there are two mitigating factors you have to consider: Most of the things these wealthy ponies suffer from aren’t very acute, so I don’t think you’d need to come running all the time –and if they do insist on un-booked appointments then we can simply charge them extra for that, to the point that they’ll want to book appointments no matter what”

The hesitant and frowny face that Speaker was making – the sort that only truly (physically) old ponies could really pull off – said it all, but at the same time Speaker actually liked the idea of charging the rich ponies extra for emergency appointments: “How much extra can we charge?”

“Well, for guild factors and the likes – they know they won’t live forever, so they’re usually more than willing to flaunt their wealth by spending as much as possible… hell, if we do this right you could probably earn enough money this way to fund the clinic yourself, without my help” Cash suggested.

Red yawned, finding all this talk of medicine and rich ponies boring. With a nod to the rest of the circle she excused herself – she had found more fun things to do while the rest of the circle talked at the fighting rings in Bastion district, for apparently the reigning champion in the one on one pony fights, a gladiator known as Panther, had recently gone missing, so quite a few hopefuls were fighting to take his spot.

Speaker liked the idea of financial independence, although he insisted that Cash stay on as financial manager or something similar – all Cash had to say was that he wanted to be paid very well for his services…

The next day Speaker and Shimmer returned to the clinic. Despite dawn barely having broken then there were already ponies waiting outside the clinic. The exalted duo helped those who had arrived early, then closed the clinic by putting a sign out on front that read: “Closed for renovations and expansion. Will open again sometime come Resplendent Water”
What followed were two weeks of – if not intense – then at least highly focused training and mental exercises, only occasionally interrupted when a building would collapse, or there was a fire nearby, and the two rushed to help.

As Speaker mastered the basics of shaping wyld energies into forms native to creation a different kind of distraction appeared: Draining an area of wyld energy would catch the attention of quite a few changelings – forcing Shimmer to defend Speaker as the rituals and incantations that were part of the wyld shaping technique didn’t allow for breaks, pauses or interruptions more than a few seconds long.

The fighting that usually ensued on account of this was often brutal, making Speaker and Shimmer quickly stop training inside the closed clinic – instead opting to relocate to a spot out of sight of the mercs patrolling the Firewander wall, but only barely: They could still see the changelings coming, and whittled down many of them with iron-tipped arrows.

Seeing the changelings heading for you be pincushioned with arrows that each burst into brilliantly chromatic displays of light and disintegrating fantasies was unnerving - but Speaker also found it immensely satisfying, as changelings had always been the one type of foe that Lookshy could never truly defeat…

Shimmer experienced the events a little differently – chiefly because she was the one doing all the fighting, ripping changelings apart with a brutal cunning that saw most of the wyldlings destroyed before they could initiate their own shaping attacks.

This all came to ahead on the sixth day of practice, when Speaker finally felt that he had figured out how to permanently give shape to the raw ambient wyld energies, for this apparently elicited a far greater response than previously: This wasn’t the usual half dozen drones, no mere mindless figment’s of a powerful changeling’s imagination: These changelings were larger, bigger than adult ponies, with bodies replete in chitinous scales that looked like black leaves, but worst of all they seemed far more… imaginative… and aware of their surroundings: These changelings were actually sentient – individual changelings of great power, like the samurai to a Daimyo.

These intelligent changelings at first caught Shimmer off guard, as they spat arrows of green lightning and burrowing seeds that drilled into stone and sent out tangling stinging tendrils from afar, held a loft on their insect-like wings. The rooftop that the duo were on, so Speaker could easily draw in wyld energies, was quickly covered in a hellish maze of flashing green lightning and thin wiry tentacles of gnarled stone-roots that tried to grab anything that moved in reach. Suffice to say the charm training was thoroughly interrupted – but the changelings didn’t stop on that account.

Shimmer tried to leap out and engage the changelings, dodging most of the seeds and arrows, but the few that hit made flight extremely difficult – Speaker looked on in horror as the two dozen flying changelings dove down to chase the tangled and falling Lunar…

It was difficult to see what was happening in the alley Shimmer had crashed in – and Speaker was having his own problems with the tendril-seeds that were trying to pin him down: With every swing of Gift half a dozen tendrils would snap like taught metallic string, but new ones would simply erupt from the seeds. All Speaker managed to see down in the alley was a mass of blackness pulsating. He would have cried out for Shimmer, cried out for others to help, but he knew quite well that in Firewander no ponies ever willingly ran towards changelings – not even the mercs who were paid to do so.

As Speaker twisted and slashed at the tentacles trying to pin him down, a bone-colored heap suddenly fell down near him – the tentacles instantly swarming over the form and pinning it down. A second or two later a chill wind announced what landed on the rooftop a split second later: A figure of living shadow, its limbs writhing with spectral worms burrowing through translucent flesh and hooves…

“Bright Machine Speaker, I have need of your services” A voice spoke, a voice that tore at Speaker’s mind unlike anything else – well, one voice had… so as the dust settled Speaker looked up and felt his stomach churn at the sight of the Bodhisattva of Resurgent Misery and Lost Causes in all his inglorious splendor.

Author's Note

Yes, that was Slugbox's OC who cot 'cured' - I did ask permission. If you have an OC you want cured of something as part of a cameo, send a PM, or hit me up on my asktheexaltedponies.tumblr.com for a visit to the clinic