Author's Note

I recently bought Payday 2, and this has been building in my head ever since. I know that there are a lot of crossovers with Payday, but I've never been one to avoid cliches.

Connections

Equestria was burning. The flames stood still over houses, tearing through fields, or burning in the air on what seemed to be nothing at all. Some fires had been reduced to embers, but others were in the state of a full inferno. However big the fires, they gave off no heat, and remained in the state and the place they were. Ponies had their faces locked in agony, though no sound whatsoever came out of their mouths. Even the frozen lands to the north had burned, the flames dancing within the tundra through the reflections of the permanent ice covering the northern cap of the planet. It was like a photograph of the apocalypse, and no sign was anywhere that there had ever been or would ever be anything alive in it. No sign but one.

Through the devastation, a single pony walked through the flames, looking around at the devastation of her home. Twilight didn’t know exactly how it had happened, or why, but the bearers of the Elements of Harmony, and her best friends in the world, had been taken, and she was the only one of them left in Equestria. For the Elements of Harmony to truly be separated was the worst thing that could possibly happen, and with the Tree of Harmony lost to her due to what the invaders had done, the only thing Twilight could do to protect her home was to completely halt the flow of time there.

All her other friends who could still move had already left, travelling through the portals via their own magic. Celestia had travelled by the sun, Luna by the moon, Cadance guided by Spike’s love, and Discord by... whatever he did. Twilight’s magic was connected to Equestria, though, and that limited her options dramatically. She had to stay in Equestria, or else it would be lost forever. She couldn’t directly go looking for her friends. All she could do was stabilise her world, and the portals leading back to where the invaders had gone.

That left her to search one more portal the invaders had left through. They’d opened five more, rather than simply returning to their own world, though why they would do such a thing eluded her. She didn’t even know who they were, only that they clearly had the destruction of Equestria as their ultimate goal.

But she wouldn’t let them. As long as she could act against them, she would. And already, she had managed to scry out a few things about the world she had been assigned to search. She’d found Rainbow Dash, locked up in a small metal room, tranquilised beyond what was necessary. She didn’t know how anyone but her captors could get the vault open. It’d take a master safe cracker or a career criminal of some sort.

Something tugged on her consciousness as that thought left her mind. Maybe she could find a way to hire a career criminal. She could only hope that the criminals she chose wouldn’t hurt her friend. Either way, it would be taking a massive risk. All she could do was make the best of a bad situation. And on top of that, bits were made out of pure gold, so that could easily grease the wheels...

~~~

There were some users on Crime.net who thought that Bain, the website’s mysterious administrator, literally never slept. Still others thought he was some sort of ghost in the Internet, able to move between sites through electrons, and had no physical body. Neither of these were true. Bain had a physical body, and it had physical needs. Though he could occasionally suspend them for the duration of a job he was overseeing, he still had to eat, sleep and consume copious cups of coffee to avoid dying or falling asleep at his terminal.

In his lair, the monitors flashed all around him with all the information he needed about the people requiring jobs, places recommended for a job, and the people willing to act on them. He could read this information like the Matrix, and distribute the right jobs to the right people, along with the money. He usually skimmed a bit off the top himself, but that was just the price of doing business, particularly his business.

He wouldn’t call it ‘organised crime’ directly. Sure, there was crime involved and he organised it, but it wasn’t large-scale stuff like long-term drug operations. He’d distribute a hitman to someone wanting a rival producer gone, but he didn’t produce himself. That was how crime worked these days, and it had paid off well for him.

A message suddenly popped up in the corner of the window, its text an unusual purple colour:

hello, mr. bain

He didn’t know what to make of it, and so he simply clicked it shut. As he turned away, he saw out of the corner of his eye that it was opening again:

i have a proposition for you

“What on earth are you?” he asked out loud, wondering to himself. “And how did you get here?”

there is a vault that currently contains a package that was stolen from me

retrieve it, keep it safe, and i will make it worth your while

How did they hear that? he wondered. He was starting to get more and more paranoid, but for now, if someone could do that to him, they could easily turn him in if he offended them. He clicked on the window and typed in himself, How worthwhile?

about half a million dollars in 24-carat gold for you and all your contractors

your part when you take the job, the rest for your crew on completion

I really don’t know about this. It just seems so... strange. Why would you come directly to me?

then you don’t want the job?

okay

There was a short pause, then all the text so far disappeared, and replacing it was two words:

wake up

As Bain opened his eyes, he realised that what he’d seen was a dream. As he thought about it, though, there was no way it could be anything else. Who could possibly hack into his computers to post messages like that? If someone wanted his crew specifically, they could send out a request like everyone else.

He stood up and walked into his lair, only to see a box on the table in front of his keyboard. The box seemed to weigh about twelve kilograms when he picked it up and moved it. Opening it slowly and carefully, he looked inside, and saw a large number of gold coins. There was a piece of paper lying on top of the coins, blank side up.

Bain pinched himself once to ensure he wasn’t still dreaming, but the box and the paper remained. Slowly, he reached out for it and turned it over. There was a map of a building that Bain recognised as a Harvest and Trustee Bank, with the main vault marked with an X. A map next to it detailed its location, which he recognised as the West End of Washington. There was also a drawing of a cloud with a rainbow lightning bolt coming off it, circled twice. At the very bottom of the paper was written, in perfect copperplate handwriting, Do we have a deal, Mr. Bain?

“As long as you stop making me sound like Rowan Atkinson... okay, I’ll play your game.” He pulled up a window that he never fully closed, containing four images and four phone numbers. Calling them all at once into a conference call, he said the only words he needed to:

“Gentlemen, it’s time to get paid.”

~~~

Even though Rainbow Dash had been conscious for a while, she hadn’t been able to move. Her legs had been tied up two and two, and her wings bound to her body. Even beyond that, she could barely feel her limbs, and in the position she’d been left, she was unable to roll off the bench.

Immobilised as she was, all she could do was remember how she’d gotten into this situation. As far as she could tell, it was entirely out of her control. Out of nowhere, she’d been grabbed and thrown through some vortex that made her feel sick, then injected with something. When she woke up, she was in the small, stagnant room, and a voice she couldn’t see the owner of had told her that “her accommodation was only temporary,” and “she would be reunited with her friends soon enough.”

She could hear some noises outside the room, though they were muted heavily by the large metal door. None of it was coherent, but it was active and it sounded a lot like conversation. Once in a while, she thought she could make out a word, but realised that it wasn’t anything. She also considered calling out, but only once, when she realised the croak she was reduced to wouldn’t even make it through the door at all.

It seemed like nothing would ever happen, and Rainbow would meet her end of days in that stuffy, oppressing room. All of a sudden, the hairs on the back of her neck started tingling. That was always a sign that something was about to happen.

What happened was a loud bang! noise that penetrated even the door, and the sounds of screaming following it.

“Everyone get down!” a voice shouted, finally loud enough to be heard through the thick metal. “Wolf, set everything up here! Chains, get the lobby!” His voice was suddenly cut off by a loud shriek that seemed to be an alert signal. “And Hoxton, turn off the fucking alarm so we can hear ourselves think!”

The alarm shut off a few seconds after that last command, but it seemed too late, as another set of noises started outside, barely audible. “That’s the cops, fellas!” the voice called again. “Wolf, how much longer are you gonna take with that drill?!”

“You wanna give it a shot, Dallas?!” a second voice called back. He said something else immediately after, but was drowned out by a loud whining noise that prevented her from hearing anything else outside the room. She couldn’t even put her hooves over her ears to keep it out, as it got louder and louder for a few minutes before suddenly stopping.

She could hear more of the loud bang! noises through the vault, then a third man’s voice came through: “Who sold us this drill, the cops?” The whining returned immediately after that, getting louder and louder as the wall seemed to glow from heat. Finally, the noise stopped and the wall swung open, revealing itself as a door.

Rainbow couldn’t see out very clearly, but there was a figure standing in the circular hole, upright on two legs like a minotaur without horns. She could hear it ask, “Are you guys sure this is what we’re looking for in here?” before it stepped closer, holding up her wings roughly. She tried to call him off, but only barely managed to croak again. “Holy shit, it’s alive! Bain, are you sure about this?”

He paused for a few seconds before telling the air, “Okay, okay, I got it. I’ll get it out of there. C’mon, up you get...” He tried to move her off the bench, but she fell to the ground, unable to move with her hooves tied up. “Ah, shit... I’m gonna have to carry you, aren’t I? Everyone, cover me! We can’t let this package get shot up!”

After a burst of noise, a voice called back, “They’re backing off anyway! Now’s the time to move!” With that, she felt herself being lifted into the air and slung over the creature’s back. Outside the metal room, it seemed like there was an explosion of colour all of a sudden, though she had no idea what kind of place she was being carried through. Without warning, she felt herself being thrown, and sliding along the ground until she hit a wall.

From what she could see, she’d been thrown into a tunnel, and the creature took one last look before turning around and raising something he’d been holding in his hand. “Wolf, what are you doing in there?!” he shouted, running towards a building in the distance. It could have been the one she’d just been taken out of, but she couldn’t get a good look before something blocked her view, a shadow like the one that had saved her. This one raised up something in its own hand, and suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her neck.

He reached inside to grab at her, but suddenly, his head exploded in a shower of blood which she tried to pull herself away from. “It’s okay! It’s still alive!” the voice shouted. She thought he was reaching in towards him, but her vision and hearing were starting to blur.

What was that thing that hit me? she wondered drearily, before the horse tranquiliser she’d been shot with fully took effect, and she fell unconscious in the back of the van.