Effigy of Anarchy

The foyer of Messerschmitts grand mansion was every bit as freezing as the outside. Cloudchaser felt herself shiver subconsciously; the expectation of warmth, now dashed, froze more than any amount of snow or ice.

Silent, now a ghost’s shadow in the blackness within, stopped and began fumbling. A moment leader, a light burst forth to illuminate the room ahead. She produced another flashlight from her saddlebag and passed it to Cloudchaser, who mutely accepted it. Now that she saw what was ahead, she felt herself struck dumb.

The architecture and construction of the house had been top-notch, at least when it had been purchased. Black and white tiling made of authentic marble lined the floors, meeting great pillars stretching up to the ceiling. Wholly unnecessary for support, it gave them room an ancient feel of strength and intimidation.

As if to spite the mood of the ponies of yore, a couch had been planted firmly in the middle of the room; next to it, a barrel, the top sawn off, and the lingering smell of smoke. Food packaging and miscellaneous garbage littered the floor, along with ashes and bits of paint that had peeled off the walls. Nopony had cleaned the place in some time.

“Well,” Chase remarked as she took it in, “I certainly wasn’t expecting this.”

“Interesting,” Silent said.

Beyond the makeshift campsite in the middle of the room lay two grand oaken doors, complete with brass handles the size of a pony’s head. Their mute counterpoint to the garbage and filth that had accumulated in the surprisingly sparse, chilled room. Even though a layer of dust had caked over them, they still glinted in the light of Chase and Silent’s tools.

Across the handles of both sets of doors were wooden boards, barring them from the outside. Silent paid little attention to the curious furniture arrangement that presented in front of her, and instead took to studying the portals.

“I’m serious, Silent. I was expecting - well, someplace livable,” Chase said.

“Forget that, focus on what’s important. These doors are coated in dust.”

“You know they’re barred too? Don’t tell me you didn’t see that.”

“Yes,” Silent said, “and they’re coated in dust. They’ve been barred for a long time. Why?”

“This just keeps getting worse,” Cloudchaser said.

Silent prepared to heft the board out from one of the doors as Cloudchaser gasped.

“Wait! Don’t - ”

As if suddenly realizing she was in the midst of breaking and entering, she held her hooves up to her mouth. Her flashlight arced up to the ceiling, leaving only a view of Silent as she struggled to detach the board for a moment. As it slid free, she discarded it and let it clatter against the ground.

An echo bounced through the room and into the house. Nothing stirred within.

“Uh, Silent?” Cloudchaser said, trying to keep back the quiver in her voice, “Don’t you want to, uh, maybe investigate a bit here first?”

“No.”

“You sure? This is plenty weird. We could spend all night figuring out why the guards set up camp in here. Right?”

“Chase, this is no time for fear. Focus.”

Cloudchaser swallowed loudly as Silent pushed on the door. She kept her own flashlight pointed at the ground in front of her, letting Silent’s illuminate the room beyond.

Still frozen, still quiet, and every bit as dusty as the brass finish had been, the room beyond at least had soft carpets. Silent wasted no time entering as Chase argued with herself yet again. Finding yourself alone in a creepy mansion, being worse than being further in said mansion, pushed her to follow just after Silent.

The room was a two-story affair, with a grand staircase leading up and ornate railings along the balcony above. Images of griffons had been carved onto the bannisters at certain intervals, and tapestries worth thousands of bits hung over the walls. Much of the imagery was of griffons, very few of ponies, and all of them in triumphant poses. Scenes of battles from the past or of armies marching with heads held high dominated the room as Silent and Cloudchaser swept their lights over it.

Silent kept the pace up, stepping in and looking for - well, whatever it was she was looking for. Cloudchaser idly followed along behind her, forgetting her nervousness in favour of curiosity for the sublime interior decorations. Silent stopped abruptly, turned around, and trod back to the door. She shut it quietly and shot a look at Cloudchaser, who returned a sheepish grin.

“When possible,” Silent said, “leave things as you found them. We’ll need to replace that board on the way out.”

“Okay,” Chase said. Silent wordlessly went back towards the stairwell.

There were dozens of rooms on this floor, matched by dozens more on the next. A hallway ran further off into the darkness, so long that Chase’s light could not see the end. A curious feeling overtook her, that of hopelessness. She didn’t even know what they were looking for, and now she felt they’d never find it.

“Silent?” she asked.

“Hm.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Evidence,” Silent said.

“Of what?”

“I want to know what he did to Flitter, how he did it, who helped him, and why. We find that, then we can leave. Understand?”

Cloudchaser nodded. Silent had already started towards one of the doorways at the rear of the room, just under the stairs. She pushed it open, letting loose a cloud of freezing dust as she did so.

Beyond was a room that had been stripped bare, except the carpet. Just beyond the windows lay the endless blackness of the night outside. Within the room, everything was gone. Paint peeled from the walls and some assorted papers and trash remained, but no furniture. An emptied out closet promised no clues, and Silent shut the door without entering.

“What happened here?” Cloudchaser asked.

Silent approached the next door, and found it in somewhat better condition. It had been opened recently: a contradiction that was not lost on her. Whatever was inside would yield some insight.

This room was in the same layout as the other: small, square, and with windows in roughly the same positions. It was properly furnished; those furnishings, however, were all overturned.

Cloudchaser let out a gasp when she saw the state of the place, and Silent wondered just how often a pony could be surprised in one night. She shook her head and stepped within. This time, Cloudchaser closed the door as she followed.

This place had, at one point, been a study. The walls had bookshelves on them, though at least one-third of the books had been unceremoniously shunted onto the floor, with the rest laying at random angles over each other on the shelves. There had been a reading desk in a position that could clearly be seen by its indentations on the carpet, but that desk had been catapulted across the room and now slumped against the far wall. The chair or sitting pillow which may have matched it was nowhere to be found.

“You think maybe somepony robbed the place?” Cloudchaser asked.

“No broken windows, no signs of forced entry, and it doesn’t begin to explain that campsite outside. No, this wasn’t a robbery. Plus, robbers are usually after valuables, not smashing up rooms.”

“Then what?” Chase asked.

“Vandals are unlikely, particularly given Messerschmitts status and the neighborhood,” Silent said. She held a hoof up to her mouth and said nothing further.

Cloudchaser idly wandered into the room, checking the bookshelves. She was no forensics expert, though, and had no idea what to make of anything. She picked up one of the books and opened it, without checking the title, to a random page.

‘Let me out. It’s in here with me let me out. I don’t want to be in here. It’s too tight. Why won’t you just let me out? I’m scared. It’s cold. Let me out, please?’

Cloudchaser wondered what kind of book she had just picked up. A murder mystery? A psychological thriller? The rest of the page was just the same thing: a protagonist wanting to be let out of something. The previous page was just more of that, too, and the page previous that. She flipped through the other pages, all the way back to the beginning of the book, and found that they were all like that.

Confused, she shut the book and looked at the title. ‘I don’t want to be in here please let’ was the heading, with no author listed. The title ran off the right edge and had been drawn on with pencil.

“Silent?” Cloudchaser asked, holding up the book. She saw that Silent was reading another one which had the same sort of scrawled authorship.

“Seems like a paranoid's journal,” Silent muttered as she looked up, “constant referral to being trapped, being held down, and being punished. Given the state of the writing, I’d say somepony wrote it on top of a blank journal book.”

“This one’s the same story,” Cloudchaser said as she passed her book to Silent. Silent gave it a brief look before nodding. Cloudchaser let herself smile, but it faded after Silent either failed to get the joke, or didn’t care enough to dignify it.

From somewhere deep within the mansion, a loud crash caused Chase’s hair to stand up on end. She nearly screamed but caught herself at the last moment. Silent merely turned in the direction of the noise.

“What was that?” Cloudchaser asked, nearly dropping her flashlight. Her legs were shaking hard, and she sat down to try to calm herself.

“Don’t know. Let’s go find out,” Silent said.

“What?”

“I don’t have time for nerves, Chase.”

“But - “

“I also don’t have time to argue,” Silent said, and she started for the door.

Cloudchaser ran to catch up, nearly running into Silent’s flank just outside the study’s door. Silent was looking up towards the second floor.

“I’m not sure if it came from up there or from below. We should split up,” Silent said.

“No!”

“Hm,” Silent said, “You’re probably right. We’ll cover less ground, but it’ll be easier to subdue an attacker if there’s two of us.”

“That is not what I meant!”

“I know,” Silent said. Without waiting, she sauntered off towards the source of the noise, somewhere down the hallway on the other side of the building. Once again, Cloudchaser took a deep breath and followed.

Silent’s light danced across door after door as she went further into the hallway. Paintings of famous or important ponies and griffons lined the edges, along with what looked like framed newspaper articles. Without time to stop and examine them, Silent merely took note of the overall themes. She couldn’t recognize any of the names she happened to glance at, only that they were wearing clothes and hairstyles that were long outdated.

The door at the far end of the hall was double wide and contained metal buffers to be pressed against. To the left, the hallway continued further, and the sound had been coming from somewhere along. Silent was not certain exactly where it come from now, but it’d have to be within a short distance of where they were now. She pressed herself against the double doors and waited.
This time, Silent signalled for Chase to halt as she stood there, listening. She paused briefly to confirm that there was no sound coming from beyond the doors before she dared to open them.

The smell of an abandoned kitchen assaulted her nose as she proceeded. Curiously, it was not the stench of rotten food but of decaying cleaning supplies. The distinct aroma of expired bleaches which had eaten into their containers and spilled onto the floor was overwhelming, and it was not long before she saw the stains leaking out from the cupboards that ran around the edges of the room.

Even stranger still was the state of the place. While it had been ransacked to some degree, food containers were still in the shelves and cupboards, just every single cupboard had been opened. Some had had their wood panelling torn off and thrown aside, others lay ajar without any notable sign of damage.

Silent’s eyes locked on the fridge and the cabinet immediately adjacent to it. She trotted over and saw that her suspicions were correct: everything in these cabinets was non-perishable. This particular one had salted peanuts in an air-tight container and canned carrots, while the others had all sorts of jams and hermetically sealed dried fruits.

“Chase,” Silent said, “I know you’re not going to like this, but you need to go on ahead.”

“Silent, I - “

“I’ll be right behind you. I need you to find whatever caused that noise before it gets away, but I also need to check this room in greater detail.”

Cloudchaser grimaced and growled.

“Don’t engage it,” Silent said, “Just find out where it is and stay quiet. I’ll only be a minute.”

“Fine,” Cloudchaser said with a bitter note. She found it surprisingly difficult to leave the kitchen, but Silent was not in the mood to argue and had already busied herself checking through the cabinets.

Silent did a quick check at the door as Cloudchaser left. Not seeing her light beyond it any more, she grabbed the jar of peanuts and wrenched the top open.

She poured the peanuts into her mouth, chewed, swallowed, and repeated. She gasped for air in between gulps, before sending more nuts down. Once the peanuts were exhausted, she tore open a can of dried peaches, then one of apricots, then a jar of raspberry jelly. She devoured every one completely and as fast as she could.

Satisfied, she opened the fridge and tore into it. Most of its contents were expired, but somepony had left several bottles of water and soda which were still good. Strangely, there were also six cans of opened paint in the fridge, lending it a metallic smell. Silent made note of that as she guzzled through the water bottles.

Silent shook her head a few times and wiped her mouth off. A quick search of the rest of the kitchen yielded nothing of particular note that she had not already seen, save one: the stench of cleaning supplies had been caused by somepony mixing the chemicals together and storing them in plastic vessels, including emptied soda bottles. She added it to the long list of clues and quickly departed after Cloudchaser.

Cloudchaser had made it halfway down the hallway before she had stopped. She waited patiently when she heard Silent approaching and bobbed her head up and down slowly.

“Find anything?” she asked.

“Clues. You?”

Cloudchaser’s hoof was shaking, causing her light to flicker wildly across the wall. She merely shook her head.

“You’re doing great, Chase. You’ve been very brave so far,” Silent said, though her face did not brighten and her voice remained low.

“I just keep telling myself that there’s nothing in here. I mean, the sound was probably just the house settling, right?”

“Probably,” Silent said.

“Yeah,” Cloudchaser said, smiling weakly.

Silent abruptly grabbed Cloudchaser and threw her backwards. Chase went limp and thudded against the floor. Her eyes closed, she threw her forelegs over her head and lay prone as Silent stood over her.

A long minute passed as Chase refused to breathe. She could feel the air disturbance of Silent standing over her, watching for something.

“What happened?” she whispered.

“Something moved,” Silent whispered back. Cloudchaser felt her shaking resume and made no effort to stop it.

Eventually, the tension in the air passed and Silent relaxed. She prodded Cloudchaser, waiting for her to stand up again. Chase, however, was not moving. She leaned up against the wall and kept shaking.

“Oh no, oh no ohnohonohono,” she muttered.

“Chase, we need to keep moving. I can see an office just over there and I want to check it.”

“There’s something in here and it’s gonna get us. They boarded the place up to keep it in here, and now we’re in here with it.”

“Cloudchaser, I need you to focus,” Silent growled.

“I want to get out of here.”

“Me too, but I can feel we’re close to something big. Now get up.”

Silent quickly shined her light down both paths in the hall, hoping to surprise whatever shape she had seen in the darkness. Her light caught nothing save the peeling paint of the disused corridor, and the partially opened door that was marked ‘Office’.

Cloudchaser did not move. Instead, she let out a low whimper.

Silent raised a hoof and brought it hard across Chase’s face. A single tear leaked from Chase’s eye and she stood up wordlessly.

The two slowly made their way down the hall, with Cloudchaser taking one step at a time and nervously looking over her shoulder every few seconds. Silent stayed in the lead, likewise looking for any errant shadows. She hadn’t seen exactly what was in the darkness, or what it could have been, but she had seen it in the middle of the hallway before it moved. It hadn’t gone into a room, or further away. It had just been there, and then not.

It took several minutes to make it to the office door, during which there were no signs of trouble. Silent waited at the door for Chase to shamble in, then, with one last look at the corridor, entered and shut the door behind her. She grabbed a nearby chair and propped it against the doorknob, for all the good that would do.

The door had a glass window on top where a name had once been written in ink. The office had presumably been in use at some point, as the name slot had been filled in with a piece of paper which was now somewhere along the assorted trash filling the room.

Like most of the rest of the building, the furniture in here was in varying states of decay and destruction. Papers were scattered all over the floor, books and binders had been tossed from their filing cabinets, and then the cabinets themselves were turned over and left.

Now, Silent was hyper-alert. She scanned every corner of the room for signs of another presence and found none. She waited for a moment and heard only the sound of Chase’s quietly rattling against a wall, and of the wind blowing against the window on the far side of the room.

Cloudchaser let out a gasp as the wind picked up suddenly. The blowing against the glass had made a howling noise, which died a moment later as the wind slackened. Cloudchaser had begun shivering and her teeth chattering. She seemed to be trying to speak, but nothing coherent came out. Silent pushed her until she stood again, taking her further away from the door. Silent left her propped against one of the cabinets while she searched.

Finally, this room gave some real evidence she could use. Everything was dated from January of that year or earlier, putting a solid abandonment time of eight months. Most of the papers here were of various business records, but it was nothing surprising to Silent. Messerschmitt had purchased a controlling interest in the Equestrian Aeronautics Corporation around that time, and most of the documents were records of his various hirings, firings, and dealings.

Putting aside the conventional documents, Silent turned to one of the binders littering the floor. This one was full of tax records concerning Messerschmitts purchasing of the house they were currently in, plus several other properties around Trottingham he had bought. Silent pulled a few choice papers out and stuffed them in her saddlebag.

Cloudchaser seemed to be calming down now, but she still hadn’t moved and she hadn’t taken her flashlight off the door since Silent had set her down. Suddenly, she clicked the light off and held her head in her hooves. Silent briefly checked to make sure she was okay, and found that Chase merely wanted to leave.

“Please hurry up,” she said. Silent nodded and resumed searching.

A few more uninteresting finds later, and Silent finally got what she had been searching for. A huge dumping of funds, stock options, and EAC shares into Messerschmitts name by a group called the Sons of Equestria. The bank record for it stood out among the other assorted papers as it was printed on a light-blue parchment instead of conventional white copy paper. This was everything she needed to really get to the bottom of this case, and she turned to Chase, ready to tell her the good news.

Cloudchaser’s eyes were focused on the doorway. Her mouth was agape, and she could not even muster the courage to turn her flashlight on. As Silent looked at her, she said one thing.

“It’s watching us.”

Silent swung her flashlight to the door, exposing a pony-esque silhouette just beyond it. At that exact moment, as the light stung its eyes, it struck the door.

The wooden chair buckled and creaked, but did not give way quite yet. A crack propagated along one of the legs and Silent ran a quick calculation. She darted towards Cloudchaser and pulled her up.

Another strike came against the door as Silent dragged Cloudchaser towards the far end of the room. Cloudchaser did not move or resist, she merely kept her eyes trained on the door. As Silent reached the far end of the room, she heard another strike and felt a blast of wooden splinters as the chair gave way.

Silent hefted Cloudchaser in one motion and threw her at the window, sending Chase careening through and scattering hundreds of glass shards everywhere. The dozens of small cuts she suffered snapped her out of her funk, and she bolted upright before taking to the air. Silent did not even cast a look back as she leaped out the window afterwards, soaring into the sky as well.

Now a hundred yards up, she chanced to look back at the broken window to get a glimpse of their pursuer. However, there was nopony at the window, and no tracks in the snow outside. Cloudchaser had flown halfway across the yard now and was probably not going to come back at any cost, so Silent drifted down slowly and landed in the snow across from the window.
She daintily approached the open portal, peering in to try to see what was inside. Nothing moved, nothing attacked. As she got closer she stepped over the shards of glass that had been scattered everywhere and could see the whole of the office before her. Nothing stirred.

Silent shook her head and took off, heading around the front of the house. When she arrived at the guards camp, she wasted no time replacing the board that they had dislodged on their way in, and then leaving immediately.

She had what she needed, and had a new lead. Whatever had been in Messerschmitt’s house could stay there, for all she cared. It was his bodyguards’ problem now.

“And?”

His muted guest stood in the corner of his hotel room. No further words needed be spoken here, the mere presence of his visitor told him all he needed to know.

It would work out better than expected. Indeed, this candidate would be the best of all the ones he had found so far. Indeed, perhaps too good. So good that his gift would only dampen the reality. This one was something he could not improve. It needed to be caught, held, and preserved.

“Seal the breach,” he said.

At that, his guest bowed and exited the room, heading downstairs to fulfill his orders.

He allowed himself to smile, a broad glistening grin that stretched from ear to ear. Everything had gone his way now, there was no way he could lose or even be slowed. It was so wonderful, that he wondered why he had not done this sooner.