As for Manehattan, it is a place apart.
One of the things that comes up a lot in casual pony conversation is what the greatest city is. Many say Canterlot, with its great white walls and fantastic vistas that linger on the mind and come unbidden to the mind in the dark hours of the night, all watched over by the great palace of the princesses (May they rule for forever.) Some argue that Nuremburd in Gryphony has always been the greatest, with its heavy gothic architecture and the Fliegenstrabe—a permanent windstream allowing them to fly from Nuremburd to any other city in the nation without rest.
Yet others speak highly of the cloud city of Albaneigh, hanging over the North Sea, and the massive clockworks in the Big Hen that show not only the time in the city, but the true time set to the heartbeat of the universe. It is even argued that Instanbull in the decadent Minotaur Empire is obviously the best city, with its domed minarets decorated in abalone harvested from the nearby seas and the Tower of Urt which is said to reach beyond the skies to allow the faithful to gaze upon the very face of God. If you asked anyone, they would all give you a different answer—Des Manes, Seaddle, Los Pegasus, Chicoltgo—and every single one of those ponies would be wrong.
Every single pony knows for fact and true what the greatest city is, though they may not say it. There’s only one correct answer to the question of what the greatest city is. Only one makes sense—Manehattan.
Yes, Manehattan! The city of dreams, of opportunity—here is where the deals are made, where alliances are forged and broken and fortunes won and lost. This is the city where big fish from little ponds learn that they’re nothing but guppies swimming in a pool full of sharks. There is no greater city, not here in Equestria, not in the whole world.
The stories of the founding of this place say the first ponies on the island proper fell in love with the natural orchards filled with the tastiest fruit that to ever come from Celestia’s green earth.
Some argued that they should leave the island to nature. Others disagreed and set about building the biggest port on Equestria’s eastern seaboard. Virtually overnight, they chopped the fine old orchards down to build the first market, the fruit auctioned off as the last of Manehattan’s natural produce, setting the tone for the expansion of the Manehattan Greater Municipal District.
The ponies here have always trended towards entrepreneurialism, and those who didn’t quickly learned or left broken.
Manehattan rapidly blossomed into the bustling center of trade it is today. You want griffon down pillows or a minotaur bone smoking pipe? How about a cut of lamb or phoenix egg over-easy with toast? If you want it, you can find it on these streets. Everything and anything is available to the discerning consumer that’s heavy on cash and light on morals. It is here that the great wheels of commerce turned and brought riches to the working pony, here the grand artisan guilds were founded, here the noble trade ships of the merchant houses first returned with holds filled with stores of precious gems and exotic spices from distant lands and locales beyond the imagining of your average Equestrian citizen, sailors telling tales of monstrous serpents and apes that walked on two legs in the dockside bars. It is known throughout the whole of Equestria that if you want to be big, to be somebody important with your face prominent in the all the major glossies and magazines, that you have to pound the dazzling streets of the Big City. Anyone who’s anyone does their time here. Yes, the whole world is yours, and everybody has the same chance to be somebody. Anyone can make themselves into The Next Big Thing here.
In days gone by, though, that dream came with one big proviso; anyone could make it, provided they were a pony.
Sure, other races could still be something they weren’t. You could make your way, ekeing out a decent living along these starry streets so long as you didn’t get in a real pony’s path to fame and fortune. All you had to do was offer a service the ponies considered beneath them, unfitting to dirty their clean little hooves. Griffons would often live intermixed with pegasi in the overhanging cloud districts with hardly an issue other than the occasional dietary indiscretion. You found a lot of griffons working for the cops, patrolling the districts where the rich ponyfolk refused to venture.
Minotaurs tended to stay on the earth pony side of town. Normally they worked as day laborers and itinerant tradeworkers going from paycheck to paycheck. So long as they stayed out of trouble and paid their taxes, no one gave them any bother in their little insular communities. The city had donkeys, cows, sheep—you could find them all on those Manehattan streets, working just as hard as their neighbor, be they goat, horse, or otherwise. All a respectable, beloved part of that vibrant Manehattan culture.
But for some, there was no place in that glittering city. Some races were considered persona non grata, even to the normally open-minded equines. For those few, beleaguered souls there was only one place to go—past the upscale brownstones and tired middle-class rowhouses, all the way down to the slouching, derelict slums of Haylem. Here lay the end-of-the-line, skid row: the only place where the Diamond Dogs could get their claws in and hold on and build something approaching a life.
The ‘Dogs had been brought in to tunnel out the city’s brand new subway system, a cheap alternative to hiring earth ponies and doing the whole song and dance with the Equestrian Earth Worker Union. For crossing the picket lines, the ‘Dogs had been branded scabs, their homes vandalized and their families attacked, but the ‘Dogs held on to some rundown version of Horseratio Alger’s Equestrian Dream, thinking that by working hard and being honest they could maybe make themselves into a valued part of the Manehattan community.
No such luck.
With the final tunnel carved and the last track laid, straw-bosses and city planners showed the ‘Dogs the door and asked them politely but firmly to leave. But ten years of digging under a city had made that option otherwise untenable. Their families, their lives were here in the city and they weren’t planning on leaving. The corporate overlords of the underground tried to pressure them out by foreclosing their homes and forcing other businesses to fire what ‘Dogs they had hired, but it has never been in a Diamond Dog’s nature to give up and surrender. All that pressure only hardened their resolve, and even after being relegated to the slum districts they held on, switching to the shadier parts of business and dealings.
They formed families and gangs, all working together under the head Alpha. Eventually the rich ponies up in their ivory towers gave it up as not worth their time and money, and the civil authorities begrudgingly gave the ‘Dogs free run of the slums. Not even the police went down there anymore. The streets were littered with trash and the gangs clashed over what little real estate remained livable. In one rundown apartment a ‘Dog stirred from her restless slumber.
Juno woke up to the indistinct sound of violence and a head that felt like it had been rented out to a ten-piece brass band that had been light on practice and was trying to make up for lost time. Situation entirely normal, so far as she was concerned. She sat up, stretching. Old distressed blankets stained with something she felt disinclined to identify fell away as she scratched idly at her ear. She yawned and grimaced at the taste in her mouth. Whatever she’d drunk last night had left an aftertaste not unlike turpentine or embalming fluid—given what she could afford and the disreputable, free-wheeling nature of its purveyors, it may very well have been.
She made her way to the tenement’s bathroom, if it deserved such a luxurious title. A simple porcelain commode missing a seat lurked in one corner, looking like it had last been cleaned sometime before Nightmare Moon’s banishment. A cracked sink hung from the wall across from it, half full of some murky liquid that may have started out as water sometime when the world was new. Juno looked at it dubiously and shrugged as she washed out her mouth. After all, there was no point in trying the taps. The city services had shut down the water supply to this district when the safety department condemned it as “technically unlivable”, and “a horrifying deathtrap”.
Her mouth tasted mildly cleaner, the water imperceptibly more palatable than whatever liquor she opted to down the night before. She examined herself in the cloudy, warped mirror affixed to the sink. Her sandy fur was matted and stained, her eyes bloodshot and accompanied by dark, heavy bags. She opened her mouth and with a detached sort of grimace examined teeth gone yellow with time. It wasn’t like she could afford any sort of dental work, and besides, the ponies generally shied away from sticking any part of themselves in a fanged maw, no matter how clean those chompers may otherwise be.
She turned away from the mirror with a mild growl, casting around the filthy slum bedroom for her tattered, grey vest. She found it lying crumpled on the floor. It had seen better days, but then so also had its owner. She yanked the vest on roughly, swearing profusely as all the scratch she had to her name came tumbling out of her pockets and skittered across the wood floor.
There wasn’t much.
Two bits, a cracked ruby, and a water-stained coupon for half-off a hooficure at the illustrious Bath Salt on Mane Street. It was the type of place where you needed to book two months in advance to get an appointment to get on the waiting list, that special breed of establishment where the hoity-toity “”hooves and horns” set congregated to look down their noses at all the filth infesting the city for which Juno qualified with remarkable skill. They probably wouldn’t even let her take a step towards the door.
As she scooped up what meager riches she had left, she made out the sound of knocking and indistinct yells. The thumping was hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling, and it wasn’t doing her head any favors. She had propped a rickety chair under the door knob just in case she got another late night gentlemutt caller, but the ersatz doorstop had begun to groan worryingly under the rhythmic assault. She kicked the chair out of the way and slammed the door open with a threatening snarl, but it died in her throat as she took in the shabby personages who darkened her parlor door.
Two Diamond Dogs stood shoulder to shoulder, and if Juno looked like she was having a bad fur day, she was the damn Princess of Equestria next to those two slouching, lumbering louts. Sonny stood tall in the doorway—a wiry, houndy mutt with big jowls and clipped ears. Word around the fire hydrant maintained that he’d lost them in a bet with the five-o out of Griffon district. When a griffon talks a mess about a pound of flesh, they ain’t joking around.
To his right was the much heftier Bomber. She was a pleasant enough sort, with the kind eyes of a much tried grandmother who looked after the neighborhood kids. There was steel in that velvet gaze, though, and buried under the thick layers of fat and brown fur was a reservoir of toned, hardened muscle. She carried a lead-cored truncheon fashioned from sturdy chestnut-wood on her belt—she was vicious with it, too.
Juno frowned as she took her two subordinates in. Her gang wouldn’t come beard her in her own den—squalid though it may be—without good reason. Something was afoot.
“What’s wrong?” Her voice cracked as she spoke, abused by rough alcohol and misuse during what was no doubt a wild, rowdy night. Sonny appraised his boss and with a knowing, sympathetic glance fished in his threadbare vest and took out a dented metal flask.
“A little hair of the dog, Chief?” He offered.
She took it gratefully and downed a slug. She shuddered briefly as the rotgut made its fiery way down her throat to rest somewhere south, heated like a lump of lead doused in pitch. That’s the stuff to give the boys, she thought. She offered Sonny the flask.
He took it back, face impassive. Not one for emotion, that Sonny.
“Sorry to bother you, hoss,” Bomber began, her voice as buttery as what she must have had for dinner, “but the Alpha wants all his bosses together, lickety-split.”
Juno picked at a tooth with a claw, extracting some unidentifiable piece of gristle. “What’s the word on the street? You been keepin’ your ear down, yeah?”
Bomber shrugged uncomfortably. “Ain’t heard nothin’, hoss. Which is—” She paused, considering her choice of words carefully “—somethin’ fiercely strange.” She shrugged again. “Sorry.”
Juno nodded to herself, mind working hard. It couldn’t be the blues—ever since the Collar Act Riots burned down half the Broncs. A ‘Dog’s collar was their business and no badged trotter was going to make them take it off and still have all four hooves afterwards.
Since it almost certainly wasn’t the blues poking their noses where they weren’t welcome, it could have been minotaurs looking to muscle in on the import of certain rarefied delicacies the city authority would have otherwise confiscated and allowed to go to waste, but the griffons had slammed down hard on the minos after the last try. They didn’t like having their supply routes harried, and with good veal so hard to find these days, the griffons would gladly make do with fresh, warm ground beef if it were foolish enough to interfere again.
The only option left was one she had been carefully avoiding for peace of mind and spirit, but with all the other major contenders for her attention eliminated she had no choice but to consider the one significant threat that had changed the Diamond Dogs from the premier rulers of the slums of Manehatten to these lowly dregs.
Hep Cats—those mustachioed, jazz loving, zoot-suited ne’er-do-wells—
Her eyes snapped back into focus as she turned to her pack. “Alright, if the Alpha wants us now, he gets us now. Let’s go.”
She shouldered her way past Sonny and into the dingy, poorly lit hallway. He fell into step behind her without a word. Bomber peered skeptically into the distressed room before turning and following her boss. “Hey, hoss,” She said as they hurried down the tenement stairs, “ain’tcha gonna lock up your apartment?”
Juno didn’t even look back. “Naw,” she responded eventually. “Ain’t nothin’ there worth takin’ anyway.”