Bellona

If you're reading this, it means that the little thoughts-to-text transcriber that Trixie whipped up for me is actually working. I don't feel like finding out whether it is or isn't working right now. That would require fiddling around with this little device and trying to figure out how it works, and I figure that I've got better ways to spend the rest of my life then poking around on misshapen scraps of machinery. I've got things that I want to talk about, first.

I'm not sure if they're pressing things. I'm not sure if anything I say here could work in my favor - or even if it won't work against my favor. But at this point, I'm not entirely sure I care about whether or not this gets me into more trouble, since i don't see how things can get worse from here. What I care about is making sure that after ponies here this, that they at least understand what i was going through. I need them to know that I wasn't completely a bad guy.

When Trixie gave this to me on what feels like a lifetime ago, she said that I wouldn't just have to focus on thinking about words in order to make the transcriber work. "All you need is to try and think about whatever happened that you want to record", she said. "It's supposed to help you relieve those memories as you think about them, and recall all of the bits of detail like you were living in parts of your past all over again", she said. Except when she said it, there was a lot more grandstanding and general dweeby buffoonery. After a while, it gets easy to filter out that stuff and only think about what she's actually saying. Then sometime way, way after "a while", her pompous frippery gets less annoying.

"Pompous". "Frippery". I remember when i first learned those words. I learned a lot of words from her. I miss doing that.

I hope she's okay. I don't think she is, but I don't know for sure, and I'm not sure I'll ever get the chance to know.

No. I can't think about that right now. I've got to think about what happened. I've got to think about how it started, how all of this mess began.

I guess...

I guess i should probably start with the train that took me to Manehattan. That should be concrete enough to think about. I just need to remember how it looked, and what it felt like when i was riding on there, and then...

**********************************************************************

Trains seem perfectly designed for sleeping on. First of all, a whole lot of nothing goes on there; Nogriffon (or Nopony, I guess) is supposed to talk to each other, even if they know each other, which none of them invariably do. Ergo, the whole lot of nothing gets turned into a whole lot of boring pretty quickly, especially if you don’t have anything to read. The fact that I didn’t is kind of the point of why I’m here.

My name is Gilda Griffon. This is the first time I’ve been on a train. Normally, that sort of thing is a waste of money, and the sort of extravagance that I (or anygriffon, really) can’t afford. We fly, when we need to. Cross-country. It’s not as bad as it sounds. You pack what you can carry, and you eat what you pack. And if you can’t carry all that much, you learn how to ration properly. Or, y’know, you don’t last. It’s not like being a griffon is easy.

But the train’s climate controlled. It’s got little windows so that you can look at what’s outside without having to be there. The seats have cushions, and they’re arranged into booths with tables and everything, and ponies sometimes roll around little carts full of pastries that you can buy. One of them – cream coat, blonde mane done up in a bun, blue dress-outfit – gave me a cupcake the size of my claw for free. “We don’t get many griffons on the train, dear.” She said, with the sort of unironic smile that only a pony could give. “Here, you look absolutely starving. It’s my treat – I’ll cover the cost for it later.”

The thing’s still sitting on my table. Nopony else is there to look at it. Nopony else is on my entire cabin, and I don’t even know if anypony else is on the on the train, except for the conductor and the cart-pusher-ponies.

I feel like royalty, and it’s fucking awful and I hate it.

I wouldn’t have minded flying to Manehattan, honestly. I mean, yeah, it’s far, but it’s not impossible. I’m good at flying, and I’m tough as talons. I would have made it, no sweat. But instead, I’m being treated like some kind of pony princess, in the sort of travel car nicer than anything in Griffonstone, with the sort of gigantic and elegantly-frosted pastry in front of me that’s ten times nicer than anything else I could bake.

I’m not sure if I hate this because I’m jealous, or because I resent the feeling of being pampered to, or If I just feel like I don’t deserve this. I mean, on top of everything else.

I didn’t buy the ticket. It was given to me in a letter, in the mail, flown out by a Pegasus who looked like she made up for in smiles what she lacked in brains. The hoofwriting looked a lot loopier then anypony, anygriffon…

Anything or anyone else that I knew had less fancy writing. I almost thought that the envelope wasn’t for me. Misaddressed, maybe. I’ve heard that ponies get “junk mail” from time to time – scams, or that sort of thing – but it’s too far from here to anywhere else in Ponyville, really, so I assumed this wasn’t it.

It turns out that the address was right, and it WAS for me. Somepony named “Twilight Sparkle” – Friend of Dashie and Pinkie, I guess? I dunno – said that she had…ugh.

“Had heard that the state of the Griffonstone library was in slight disarray, and could benefit from additional funding. Unfortunately, I have princess duties that I will be managing over the next few weeks, and my friends will be helping me. Fortunately, I happen to know of somepony else who is looking to expand her personal library of books. Since you’re both essentially looking for the same thing, I think that if you work together, you should be able to accomplish great things!”

The rest of the letter was a train ticket, a name – Trixie, apparently – and an address. And well-wishes, I suppose, not that those actually count for anything. No money. It figures that ponies would be completely impractical and infuriatingly right at the same time. I mean – if I need to get books, I need to get money so I can get the books. Books don’t grow on trees. I mean, the stuff that books are made from DOES grow on trees, but that’s not the point.

“Twilight Sparkle” seems to be under the assumption that friendship can get you anything you want. I refuse to believe that she’s right about it all the time. But I guess it can’t be wrong all the time either, or else I wouldn’t be here.

Greta deserves better then what we have.

Outside of the window, it’s grassy and the skies are blue. It looks like a fairytale storybook background, like the kind of stuff they had at the junior speedsters little library. Like everything else, it kind of makes me want to puke. I forgot that ponies live in this sugary-sweet little world that extends out to basically everywhere, forever. It might explain why they’re so delusional and happy all the time; Except for, y’know, all the evil monsters and stuff, they must basically live in party country.

Okay, maybe I’m jealous. Of the grass, of the train, of the stupid cupcake. But if I am, I’m allowed to be. And it’s not like there’s a lot of other options I have: it’s basically feeling jealous, or trying to fall asleep.

Then again, trains are perfect for sleeping on.

**********

By the time I wake up, the train’s already rolling into the Grand Manehatten Station. The empty cupcake wrapper’s lying on a crumpled heap in front of me, surrounded by crumbs. I don’t regret betraying my feelings more than I’d have regretted not eating the thing. So I’m unprincipled. Sue me.

The letter with the address is lying on the seat next to me. It looks a bit more crumpled then usual, but that’s probably because I was sleeping on it. I pull it out of the envelope, look at the address one last time, then fold it up, tuck it under one of my wings, and crumple up the envelope. I grab the cupcake wrapper in my crumpled-envelope claw, and use my other to sweep the rest of the crumbs off of the table. There’s no point in being a jerk about not cleaning up after myself, after all.

Walking out of the train’s a bit trickier then usual, since I’m effectively hobbling myself with a clawful of trash – and since I can’t fly, because of the letter in my wing, I’m reduced to an awkward gait. Fortunately, there’s a trash bin outside off of the train, so I hobble over there as fast as I can and throw the garbage away.

The Grand Manehattan station is…crazy pretty, I’ve got to admit. The whole thing looks like it’s made of molten brass, except for the stained glass windows stuck in it. It’s as tall as centuries-old tree, if not taller, and some of the arching columns go up so high that shadows keep me from seeing the top. The signboards are meticulously detailed, with etching on the sides in shapes that are…I dunno. I’ve never been good at remembering names for boring ideas, like all the different words for different shapes and patterns. But these ones are pretty. Really pretty.

And so, of course, I stand around gawking for at least a minute at or so, before I hear somepony say “excuse me?”, and so I turn to look and I immediately get reminded all over again about why I didn’t want to come to someplace like this at all.

The reminder took the form of a kind of portly, thinning-maned, earth pony dweeb in a pastel polo, surrounded by what I can only assume was his family; manes in slight dishevelment, identical polos slightly rumpled, faces strained with fatigue and excitement. Tourists, of all my freaking luck.

“Excuse me?”,  the thinning-maned pony asks again, holding up a camera. “I was wondering if I could get a picture? Of you, with us?”

“What.”

“Well, we’ve never seen a griffon before – up close and personal, I mean! We’ve seen them in newspapers and all, and we heard that they lived in different kingdoms and in some equestrian cities and all of that, but-“

“So I’m some sort of mythological creature. Is that it?”

“No! that’s not what I meant! I mean, ah – sorry to offend you! Really!” Thinning mane is sweating enough that it’s visibly wicking onto his collar. I know that I should be grossed out, but it’s honestly kind of funny that he’s squirming this much.

“I’m not offended, dweeb, but this is sort of basic courtesy we’re talking about. I’m not an animal, this isn’t a zoo, and I’m not here to be gawked at. So.”

This is the part of the conversation where I’m supposed to turn sharply to one direction and saunter off, completely unfazed, leaving everypony else in my wake. Like a total badass. The problem with that is that I’m supposed to turn towards my exit, which is right in front of this pack of circus clowns. So I can’t exactly turn so much as try and push my way through them, except I can’t really do that either because then I’d drop the letter I’ve got tucked under my wing-

And that’s when I realize I’ve been standing in front of these guys, staring at them like a complete moron while I try and figure out what to do. The smallest one – I’m gonna assume the youngest daughter – wipes her nose with her forehoof, which is gross. The second smallest one – I can’t tell what gender it is – is kind of scrunching its mane while staring at me with this worried look, which is a lot less gross and actually kind of cute.

And then I realize they’re all staring at me, waiting for me to do something. The camera in thinning-mane’s grip is shaking a little while he’s standing like an awkward tripod, and he’s chewing his lip in a nervous sort of way, and this pack of dweebs is exactly the reason why I don’t like hanging around ponies any more then I absolutely have to.

But I’m not here to start fights. I’m here for Greta. And as much as I don’t even want  to give these guys my picture, I’m also struck with the thought that I’m basically being a jerk for no good reason at all, and this isn’t really what she would have wanted.

“Fine”, I sigh. “One picture. But the smallest one’s not allowed to touch me.”

****************

“So this is your first time in Manehattan, too?” Thinning mane asks me. He’s pushed up right next to my eartuft and he’s trying to talk over the sound of street noise, so he’s basically shouting in my ear while I’m scrunched up in the side of an overcrowded taxicab.

“Yeah. How come you guys are here?”

“Wanted to see the sights! ‘Equestria’s Finest City’, and all of that. We’re planning on visiting Canterlot next year, but the kids really wanted to come here first.”

I glance over to my left. The ‘kids’ don’t look thrilled. I can’t blame them. I get the distinct feeling that their dad is the only reason I’m here at all – and I don’t just mean “crammed into their cab with them”, but also “detouring wherever they were going to go for 20 minutes’ worth of traffic”.

Which is why I’m here with them, instead of walking to the apartment. Cabs cost bits, and I’ve got exactly zero of those on me at the moment. But thinning mane actually offered to pay for my ride if I rode with them, which was nice of him. It was also probably his way of making up for one picture turning into four, and for the smallest one touching me even after I said no, and after I said can’t I be in a different part of the picture, and after she smeared snot all over my freaking foreleg. And also for the fact that he’s probably going to talk this entire ride, right in my ear, about stuff I couldn’t care less about.

“Hey, uh, dude. Dude.” I interrupt. “You guys didn’t actually tell me your names. Just, like, it’s gonna be kind of weird for me to refer to them as “the kids” if they’re not mine.”

“Oh! Right! My apologies! These are Seashore Shells, Six-Point Scale and Social Strata”, Thinning mane says, pointing at the runny-nosed runt, the mane scruncher and a filly who looks like she’s a hair’s breadth away from being a skeleton. “There’s my wife, next to me – her name’s Sugar Smile. Say hello, Sugar!”

“Hello”, Sugar Smile mutters. She doesn’t sound particularly sweet, and she’s not smilling at all, but I can’t blame her. She looks kind of like how I feel.

“And I’m Scrapbook Scrabbler! And you are?”

“Not nearly that alliterative.” Alliterative: it’s a big word that I’ve wanted to bust out for a while. It was on one of the non-ruined pages from a book that Greta found, a couple of days before I got the letter from “Twilight Sparkle”. It means a bunch of things that start with the same letter, which I figured wasn’t going to come up at all. But hey, it did, and I bet this dweeb doesn’t even know what it means, and I’m looking forward to boggling his little brain.

“Aheh, yeah. I mean, it sort of just turned out like that, you know?” Scrapbook Scrabbler replies, not sounding in the least bit perplexed. “We picked names that we thought were going to feel perfect for our kids without even noticing they all were alliterative until years later. Crazy, huh?”

“Y-yeah. Yeah, crazy.” I shouldn’t be irritated by the fact that he knows the word, but I am. I try not to let it show, though.

“So what’s your name, then?” he asks again. Trying to not snap at him is getting harder with every word out of his oversized mouth.

“…Gilda. Gilda Griffon.”

“Gilda? That’s a really pretty name. What does it mean?”

“How should I know? My mother named me, and I never got to ask.”

“How come?”

“I was at flight camp and flight academy since I was young, okay? Basically lived there for a lot of my life.”

“Didn’t you write to your parents?”

That does it.

“I want you to take one guess as to why I didn’t talk to my real parents. Take a guess about why I never bothered coming back from flight camp and flight academy. Take a guess about why I showed up here by myself, instead of a mom or dad or siblings or anything like that. In fact, you know what? I’ll give you three guesses.”

The cart goes quiet for a few seconds. It’s just long enough for my anger to burn away into shame, self-loathing at the fact that I was a jerk, and self-loathing at the fact that I’m feeling bad about being a jerk to THEM.

“I’m sorry”, Scrapbook Scrabbler says.

“Nah. Sorry for snapping at you.”

“But I mean, I shouldn’t have kept asking-“

“It’s not the obvious assumption to make, okay? Don’t feel bad about it. It’s just that I’m…”

I cut myself off before I say “sick of listening to you babble”, or “sick of being crammed into this cab”, or “wanting to just get away from you as quickly as possible.” Which are all true answers, which I guess makes the answer that I give not true, ‘cause of the leaving-stuff-out rule.

“…Kind of overwhelmed. By all of this, I mean. It’s just making me feel…”

“Traveler’s Fatigue?” he responds. “It happens to everypony, even those of us who are used to going on trips like this. Right, kids?”

“Right, dad”, the fillies reply in unison. The skinny one sounds utterly bored, the youngest one sounds phlegmy and mumbled, and I can barely hear the in-between one at all. Perfect family, perfectly in unison, perfectly boring. So why am I jealous?

“…Yeah”, I reply. Traveler’s fatigue, let’s go with that. Easier to let him explain how I feel then it would be to not start drama about this.

“It’s okay”, he replies, and his sympathetic tone makes me want to punch him in the face all over again. “Here – I’ll tell you what. You should go and get rested up, and if you ever feel like you want to talk to somepony, we’ll be in Manehatten for close to a week, okay?”

“Yeah. That sounds great, actually.” It doesn’t really sound great, but maybe I can get a free lunch out of it or something. Given that they’re here on vacation, I’m betting they have money. Given the taxi ride, I’m betting they’re generous with it. Like the pony on the train. Their generosity is annoying and delusional, and I’m happy with taking advantage of it.

…Well, happy and slightly guilty, I guess. These ponies are already starting to rub off on me. I hate it. I think I hate it. I’m almost positive I hate it. Maybe.

The taxicolt calls out an address. It’s mine. Doing my best to not poke anypony in the eyes, I disentangle myself from the overcrowded cab and step out in front of the apartment. It’s grey. Flat-grey. Stone grey, dust gray, bland grey. There are a few windows on it, but about half of them look cracked and the other half look old beyond belief. A battered door with a large, single, dingy-looking pane of glass is propped open with a brick. I’m suddenly struck with the realization that there wasn’t a key in the letter. I guess this works to my advantage, but how am I supposed to get into “Trixie” ’s apartment, anyway? Am I supposed to knock? What if she’s not home?

I pry open the door. The foyer, if it could even be called that, looks like it hasn’t been used in years. There are dark stains on a carpet littered with dust bunnies and a couple of candy wrappers, and a couple of pieces of paper sit on a desk pretty clearly made out of imitation wood, rather then the real thing.

“Real inviting”, I mutter under my breath. That’s probably actually a good thing, though. Unlike the clown car behind me, I’m guessing that “Trixie” actually knows what it’s like to be poor. Which means we’ll both know exactly what we have to work with, and we’re both going to want to get done with this business without any faffing about at all.

“Wait!” Scrapbook Scrabbler shouts. I turn back to look at him while I’m still walking forward, and smack a foreclaw on the brick by the door. There’s an expression on my face I want to make, and a choice curse I want to yell.

I do neither. Shoving the brick away in irritation, I do my best to look like I’m not in even a little bit of pain. “Yeah?”

“Didn’t you want our address?” he says, holding out a piece of paper.

Walking up to him – okay, maybe it’s a bit of a hobble, maybe I’m favoring one foreleg over the other, I can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt entirely – I grab the paper from his hoof and look at the address. I don’t recognize the number at all. No surprise. I guess I can always just ask Trixie about it later.

“Thanks. I’ll try and stop by sometime.”

“That’d be great! We’ve totally got to talk some more while we’re here.” Scrapbook Scrabbler says, beaming. “Say bye, kids!”

From behind him, there’s a chorus of half-hearted “goodbye”s. Again – not like I was expecting much of a sendoff. Except, I guess, from this guy. This guy, camera strap slung snugly over his chest, with his week-long vacations and his dress-coded family and his utter lack of inhibition about asking strangers for photographs in the middle of the street.

I’d be surprised if my day got any weirder then meeting him.

“Just talk to the pony at the front desk if we’re out! He’ll tell you when we’re normally around!” he chirps, waving vigorously as the taxicab driver begins to trot down the road. “See you later, Gilda!”

“Uh – yeah. Bye.” I can’t stop a grin from spreading over my face as I wave. Maybe “Twilight Sparkle” was right about this idea. I mean, if everypony in the city generally acts like this, then…

I turn back to the door, and my optimism dies in my throat. There’s the door. The door that was being propped open with a brick. The brick that I ran into, and pushed aside, with “aside” being “in front of the door”, which is to say the door that, lacking the brick to prop it open, swung shut.

A door requiring a key that I don’t have.

I can’t stop myself from snarling in frustration as I stalk over to the door and jiggle the handle, figuring that maybe it doesn’t have a lock in it after all. No dice; the door’s not going anywhere. I yank on it a bit harder, and it still fails to budge. No dice to that, either; I figured that on a building this old and crummy, I could have just snapped the lock if I pulled hard enough, but I guess it makes sense that the one thing they’d keep nice in the whole crummy place was the lock. Because, you know, everyone would totally be dying to get into a dungheap like this.

Just because I can’t get in, though, doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying to get in. There’s no way that I’m standing out in the middle of a rundown alley in a city I don’t know at all. No matter how awful it’s gonna look on the inside, at least being inside walls instantly makes the building better then the alternative.

Part of me is tempted to just break the glass panel, stick my claws through the hole and undo the lock from the inside. Another part of me recognizes that if they went through the trouble of reinforcing the lock, they probably went and reinforced the window, too, and that’s not counting the fact that I’d probably cut myself everywhere if I started fiddling around with broken glass.

Which is when I realize that glass is designed to be seen through. Yet another one of the perks of being a griffon, besides just being more awesome in general: eyes like an eagle. For high detail at long distance, all of the ponies in Equestria might as well be blind. Not me, though. Griffons are too awesome for that.

I wasn’t paying attention, but maybe there’s a little map or something on the inside; if I find a clean part of the glass and I squint, then maybe I can get an idea of where she is, and call up to her and see if she can hear me. And that’s when I get brilliant idea #2: I’ve got wings. As long as I know where she is, I can always fly up to her and knock on her window.

“It’ll probably startle the dweeb, too.” I chuckle under my breath as I peer through the glass. There isn’t a mini-map by the entrance, but there’s a series of little mailboxes attached to the left wall. There are notecards on each one, with little names scrawled on them. I squint a little more…

Bingo. Apartment mailbox #509: Trixie Lulumoon. This isn’t to say that I actually know where 509 IS, but if it’s anything like the flight academy dorm rooms, then the “5” part of 509 means that it should be on the fifth floor. There aren’t that many mailboxes on the wall; I’m probably going to have to look around 12 rooms, tops, to try and find one that fits. And heck, if anypony has a window open, I can always poke my head in and ask where she is. Maybe I’ll even find her if I’m lucky.

First order of business: Taking the letter from under my wing and sliding it in the wedge next to the doorjamb. Once i get inside the building, i can always come back and collect it again, anyway. I mean, there's always the chance that somepony will pick it up on mistake, but given that my name and my address is on the envelope, and given that there's nothing particularly interesting in the envelope, I can't imagine them actually taking it. Still, I can't help but feel a little nervous as I shove it in as far as it can go. Maybe how ponies act about mail in Manehattan is different from how they act about it in Griffonstone. Still, it's mail - how different could it be?

I start from the left side of the building, fifth floor. The first wall of windows are all closed, with the drapes shut. No surprise; the view’s not great from here. I round the corner, and the first window to my right has the drapes open, but nopony in it. Just a box next to an upended coffee table, a couple of photos and a stack of what looks like unpaid bills on a table close to a sleeping cot, and a fire axe lying on the middle of the kitchen floor, blood dripping off the blade and into a small pool on the off-colored tile.

Wait, what?

I double-back. There isn’t a window ledge to speak of, so I have to flap in the air, hovering while I peer inside.

That’s definitely a fire axe. The stuff dripping off of it is definitely red, and the pool underneath it definitely looks like blood. There’s more spatters, too; dark droplets sunk into a dull green throw rug, loose blots splashed next a refrigerator, a slick little skin of liquid around the…the long part of an axe that connects the head to the handle, whatever that’s called. That thing. It’s shining like the light’s reflecting off of something liquid on it, and it doesn’t take me that many guesses to figure out what it is.

It’s fresh. This blood has to be fresh blood. Whatever happened, whatever caused this, it happened really, really recently.

And, for the first time, I realize that I should be very, very afraid of the fact that I don't know what to do.