The Wubster had been here recently. The tell-tale signs were all over the place; neon paint everywhere, the floor and furniture still vibrating softly, the giant “W”s embedded in the walls. The fact that she was so easy to track was a testament to her insanity; the fact that she had yet to be captured a mark of her skill.
But not tonight. Tonight she would fall. She had taken a step too far, and she would finally meet justice.
The masked mare took off in a silent sprint, making a beeline for the nearest river. The splash was barely audible, the ripples on the surface the only trace of her presence.
The Shark Mare was on the prowl, and her prey would fall tonight.
This night had been empty. Thoroughly empty; from top to bottom, filled with emptiness. A terrible evening of enduring the weight of a soul-sucking hollowness in her stomach, her nerves apparently attempting to flee through her guts. Then, a few minutes where the emptiness rose up to her head; a mind pumped full of stress and adrenaline, the body acting up on years of training and practice executing the most important actions of her life. A blank mind in an unstoppable body.
Even the stallion she held in her hooves seemed unnaturally empty; devoid of courage, lacking in strength, absent of wit. He just begged for his life, his eyes abysses of terror.
She was delivering justice, she told herself. He deserved it. Her jaws, hoof-crafted for this very individual’s demise, hovered above his throat.
He deserved to die. He had to pay. His victims deserved justice.
He whimpered.
“Please let me go,” he said. “Please.”
Her eyes plunged into his, all the anger she had felt for years, all the pain she had endured. Without even a word she asked, neigh, demanded: “why?”
“Please, ma’am, I don’t want my daughter to grow up without a dad.”
It broke her. She broke eye contact, for she could not bear for him to see her cry. She broke her hold on him, letting him fall to the ground, for she could not bear to touch him a second longer.
And then she broke his jaw, for she could not bear to hear him speak another word.
The Manehattan Police department had a new prisoner to deal with. The masked mare watched from the shadows on a nearby pier as he was carted away.
The hollow night ended in a hollow victory.
The masked mare sunk back into the cold waters of the harbor, with nary a sound to indicate she was ever there.
She blinked. This was no time for memories. She could smell her prey. The Wubster was close; she could feel it. She could also plainly see it; the light show was visible ever underwater, and from such a distance, too.
She was doing something to the sewage treatment plant.
The masked mare emerged from the water in a single slick bound. She landed on the cold pavement and immediately crossed the empty street in one swift motion. She swung her grapple-tail, the fin launching up to the roof above. Emerging from the shadows of the alley, she landed on the gravel roofing and looked up. The moon hung low in the sky, the city’s skyline cutting a sharp contrast with the softly illuminated clouds. Even this simple irrelevant detail reminded her of that night, so long ago.
She shook the memories from her head. She needed to keep going, who knew what the Wubster was doing, and every second wasted reminiscing was a waste.
The lasers and spotlights sweeping the sky signaled where the Wubster was waiting.
“Madam, are you sure this is wise?”
The sun shining through the nearest window offered no comfort on this day. The Spartan room was spacious enough to house an entire ball, but contained only the butler, his mistress, and a table holding the objects of said butler’s worry.
The mare hung her head, allowing a single sigh to escape her lips. “Yes, Alert, I’m sure. I need to do this. This is literally the only thing I have left.”
Alert Care, loyal butler that he was, was not in the habit of questioning the authority of his dearest employers. The faded brown, mustachioed stallion's obedience had never faltered.
And yet, knowing this young mare’s history and all that she had suffered, he couldn’t help but let his loyalty take a single step back when met with such an overwhelming amount of honest, sincere concern.
“Then perhaps you should seek something more, madam. Something less… foolish.”
The sharp stare she directed at him felt like a dagger. He backed away from her, bowing low. “Forgive me, Young Mistress, I did not mean to insult you; I am simply concerned for your well-being. If this is what you truly wish to do, I shall support you completely and in any way I can.”
The grey filly bowed her head, sighing again. The weight she bore on her withers was unbearable even from the outside. Alert, from that instant onward, never thought of her as a filly again. She had become a mare, an adult, a tired old soul.
It pained him to see such a young one succumb to such a fate.
“This is the best technology in the world, Alert.” The mistress’s voice broke him out of his thoughts. She was gently stroking the slick costume on the table. “The best technology money can buy. You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
She turned to face him, her dark grey mane catching a stray bit of the sun’s rays. “I am actually more worried about you, Alert. I am going to make enemies, and I worry that they will seek revenge in any way they can; I don’t want you to be hurt for this.”
Alert’s face betrayed no emotion, but his voice had a new note of courage when he spoke next. “Then I believe we shall make this a secret, madam.”
“But how? How will I keep this a secret when I’m walking out the front door?”
“Your dear parents kept this a secret from you all this time, and for good reason, as Celestia knows what kind of dangerous shenanigans an intrepid young filly would have been up to with such information…” Alert stepped back and turned to leave the room, inviting his mistress to follow him. “Nevertheless, for what you have in mind, I believe the coastal cavern above which the manor was built might just be the key.”
The young mare’s jaw hung open for a second, temporarily dumbfounded by the revelation. She then gathered herself and galloped after her butler.
The thickening clouds blurred the moon into a haze in the sky. So diffused, the celestial body’s light was no match for the neon eruption blinding the dark mare from below. Spotlights of all sizes and colors, lasers and strobe lights lined every window of the Manehattan sewage treatment plant, making it both impossible and relatively painful to look inside. The Wubster was in there, waiting.
The masked mare took one last look at the faraway Melody Manor, sitting peacefully on the edge of its cliff, nearly all the way on the other side of the bay. Alert was probably worried sick right now, just as he was whenever something important was afoot.
She couldn’t let these thoughts stop her.
Hooking her grapple-tail on the building’s gutter, she rappelled down the three stories to street level, and, after retracting the cable, approached the crowd of policeponies surrounding the building.
The officers made way for her, opening a corridor straight through to the commissioner waiting for her. Commissioner Granite “Mayor” Mare shook her hoof just as she always did; briskly, with confidence, and with just the barest hint of having so much better things she’d rather be doing.
“It’s looking bad, Sharkmare,” she said with a quick motion of her head towards the flashing building. “The Wubster’s in there, doing Celestia knows what to a vital part of this city’s infrastructure, and no one can get in. Whenever my ponies get too close, the whole thing lights up even brighter and we get blasted back by that infernal music. It’s no use.”
“Hm,” the masked mare replied in a practiced, forcedly gravelly voice. “Anything else?”
“It’s hard to tell, but some of my boys say that whenever she blasts them away, they can hear her calling for you specifically in all that sound.”
“Hm, very well. Let’s see what she wants.”
And with that, the Sharkmare headed for the door.
“Tempo, my dear, are you sure this is safe?”
The grey stallion drew his wife closer as they entered the alley, their young filly in tow.
“Of course, dearest wife. No one would dare lay a hoof on such a prominent family as us on the fair streets of Manehattan! Besides, the carriage is waiting for us just on the other side of this alley. Would you rather we wait here on the cold pavement while the rest of the audience filters out of the theater and makes way? I know one little filly who is already up past her bedtime.”
“You’re right, dear. We’ll be back home in no time. Stay close, Octavia.”
The filly followed reluctantly, a strange unease washing over her as she stayed close to her parents, plunging into the shadows of an alley she would never forget.
Among the many elements of that night she would never forget.
“What’s the matter, fishbreath? Just a few goons tire you out already?”
A few unconscious bodies did indeed take a toll on the masked mare’s stamina. The few dozen that lay at her hooves had been a bit more than simply “tiring”.
She panted through her prosthetic teeth, glaring at the colorful swirl of madness that passed itself as a unicorn standing on a catwalk high above.
The Wubster adjusted her tie-dye-tie to be just perfectly askew, grinning while she did so. Her tattered suit was a mess of eclectic colors, neon bracelets, and embroidered “w”s of wildly varying shapes and colors. The madness of her mind proudly mirrored and displayed on the outside. She shook her head of wild blue hair, and wiped her shades with a hoof. “I must say, sharkstank, you’re quite the athlete for a fish freak! These clowns got their flanks dunked harder than in any of my raves!”
“What are you doing here, Wubster?”
“I just want to teach you a little lesson, finhead! On that note, watch this!”
The colorful criminal threw a hoofull of small spheres down all around the Sharkmare. The vigilante jumped back, handily avoiding the projectiles. To her surprise however, they burst into clouds of smoke covering the floor. She was careful to clamp her shark jaws shut, relying on her rebreather to filter out whatever poison this could potentially be.
The Wubster’s laugh echoed, resonating on the steel rafters of the industrial building. “Time for round two, boys! Here, grab this! Oops!”
A sack of melee weapons, both improvised and not, fell right on the back of one of the thugs with a painful crunch, spilling steel and blades everywhere. All the other ponies, seemingly invigorated by whatever gas had been spread through their systems, were quickly rising to their hooves.
The Shark of Manehattan allowed herself one frustrated sigh before going back to work.
The cemetery felt cold despite the sun. A grey filly watched as two coffins were slowly lowered into the earth. A gentle hoof came to lay on her back, slowly tapping in a hopefully comforting gesture.
“This tragedy pains me to a degree I cannot properly express, young mistress…” Alert’s voice cracked, just a little bit. He continued patting the filly’s back. “And yet I know that my sorrow cannot begin to compare to yours. Know that I will do my best to care for you as your parents would wish, and will stay by your side for as long as you need me.”
Octavia’s eyes fixated on the ground, visible to no one but a few stray insects scampering among the carefully maintained blades of grass.
“Father said the alley was safe, Alert. Was he wrong? Parents aren’t supposed to be wrong.”
Alert hesitated to voice an answer, managing little more than a vocal sigh before the filly spoke once more.
“I will make them be right. One day, Alert, my parents will be right and every alley in Manehattan will be safe for everyone.”
There was a pause.
“That is a very noble goal, Young Mistress. I am certain your parents would approve.”
“Give it up, Wubster!”
The next punch knocked the unicorn’s shades off. That didn’t stop her from smiling.
“Okay, okay, you win!”
The shark mare stopped her hoof in mid-air, awaiting the sudden and inevitable betrayal of this capitulation. Her nemesis, noticing her dark expectation, smiled even wider.
“I win too, by the way. Everypony wins, Sharky.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me tell you a story, Sharkonetta.” The Wubster casually tried to push the masked mare off her body and, seeing no success in that department, slumped limply with a shrug. “My dad was a real jerk, by all accounts. He drank, gambled, stole a bunch of crap from everywhere –made hearth’s warming hecka interesting, by the way; you never knew what kind of price range your gifts would come from, if you know what I mean–
“Anyway, dad was a real turd, but he was still my dad, you know? He paid the bills, took care of us, and under all that booze, I’m pretty sure he loved us at least a little bit.”
“Get to the point, scum! What were you doing in here?”
“Fine, I’ll abridge! One day, little scratchy filly Wubster was waiting for daddy to come pick her up from her first big girl music show, and when he never came, the young little mare walked all the way home to learn, at like three in the morning, that her old drunk idiot of a dad had been dragged to jail by a freak in a shark suit who broke his freaking jaw for no Celestia-damned reason!”
The last few words, spat out with such force and anger, made the Sharkmare reel back. In the moment, the Wubster squirmed out and away from under her, flipping herself back to her hooves. She made no real attempt to escape however, instead drawing closer to look into the Sharkmare’s eyes through the latter’s waterproof goggles.
“Y’know what I learned that day? I learned ‘justice’ is just a fancy word ponies say about ruining someone’s life to make themselves feel better about it. There’s nothing good in the world, and every good deed you do is a bad day for someone else!”
With a grand, sweeping gesture, the Wubster spun around. “And that’s what I brought you here to realize. You see those big holding tanks down there?”
The Sharkmare spared a glance at the machinery below them through the spaces between the grated catwalk’s floor. Vast vats, hulking tanks, and a labyrinth of pipes and valves and tubes.
“I spiked the whole system with enough poison to …hurt a whole bunch of ponies, you see.” The Wubster turned back around once more, this time holding a small remote control with a single button. “And when I press this little button, the-“
A fin-shaped projectile immediately smashed the device out of her hoof, sending the remains clattering over the railing.
“Hm-hm-huh-huh-heh-ha-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAHAHAAAAH!”
“What are you laughing about, you psychopath?”
“Ah-ha-haaaa… Heh, you’re so… Heh, predictable, Sharky. As I was saying, When I press this little button, the automatic countdown timer on these giant speakers around the room will… well, would have stopped them from going off in about two minutes. Now they’re going to do it, resonating the entire pipe system in just the right way to backflow all that poison through the pipes and into every home, every sink, toilet and sewer grate in at least five blocks! And this is gassy poison, by the way!”
The Shark mare was already busy racing around the room, throwing finarangs to sever any cable she could see connecting to the loudspeakers.
“That won’t be enough, Sharky; even if you cut everything, I’ve fiddled with the valves waaaay before you got here, and,” the unicorn made a dramatic show of reading a pressure gauge on the control panel she was leaning on. “If I’m reading this right, this whole place will pop like a balloon in about three minutes, and the blinking lights have been in the critical zone for a while. We’re all going to choke around here, the cops, both of us, and about a thousand of the closest homes.”
“How do I stop this?” The Sharkmare leapt back onto the catwalk, out of both finarangs and cables to cut. Seething with rage and stress, she barely remembered to fake her raucous voice.
“Well,” A white hoof pointed to the big, red lever next to the control panel. The Wubster walked away from it, seemingly inviting the Sharkmare to take a closer look. “I had a while to read the manual of this place, and it turns out this lever is the emergency purge control; shuts everything down and bypasses all securities to dump the entire contents of the facility right into the sea. Everypony will be saved! Except everyone on a boat right now, and all the little fishies! You’ll save the day, and only a few ponies will bite it. Isn’t that what justice is all about?”
The Shark Mare’s only response was another punch to the Wubster’s face, sending the maniac sprawling on the floor, clutching her face and yelling.
“AHHHHAHAHAHAH, Yeah! All this justice in my face! Feels so good, doesn’t it?”
She made no effort to get back up. The Sharkmare made monumental efforts to calm down and think clearly.
There had to be another way. Melody Industries had been contracted as consultants three years ago when the city decided to modernize the water treatment systems. She had handled the documents personally, there had to be something she could remember, something that would help. There had to be another way!
And then she recalled she had been adamant about extra security; redundant checks, manual overrides on everything, and, most importantly, at least one emergency failsafe on the emergency purge failsafe itself. There was a secondary valve further along the way, a valve that could be closed in case of unwarranted purge. The section of pipe just before that valve was made to withstand these kinds of catastrophic pressures!
She would simply need to get to the valve before the poison could. Just one last thing to take care of before that, however.
The Wubster looked up at the shadow suddenly hovering above her. “So, Shar-“
“Stuff it, Wubster.” The order, and the calm determination within took the unicorn aback. She hadn’t expected the masked vigilante to recover from the situation so fast. She had not expected being forcefully grabbed and flipped on her belly, either. Both of her forelegs were pulled up behind her back, and a cold, hard set of Shark-teeth-themed restraints clamped around them.
The Sharkmare, without a word, then walked up to the purge lever. She’d have to make this quick, and trust her suit to keep her safe. The lever was rusty, as thankfully unused as it was. She put some more of her exhausted strength into the pull, and finally it budged.
Sirens came to life, blinking warning lights joining the chaotic arrangement of aggressive lighting already present. Even over the din of music still blaring all over the facility, a deep gurgling slowly gained force.
The Sharkmare turned to the large open-air tank the facility used for one of its many treatment processes; she knew it would get vacated with the rest, and she could even see the pipe opening up.
She dove in.
The opening was still just barely enough for her to fit through, and she had to squeeze herself painfully to enter. Water was already rushing in from all sides, every evacuation pipe converging into a central line. She ran for it while she still could, and then swam as fast as possible when the fluids overtook the entirety of the pipeline’s diameter. Through the grime and waste, she rode the wave of filth, all her energy dedicated to staying as far ahead as possible.
The red, blinking guide lights embedded in the pipe’s top section made this feel like a ride through hell; they were the only things she could see with any clarity through the thin film of muck on her goggles.
Although… another light could be seen approaching rapidly. The emergency valve! She’d have to think fast; her options weren’t plentiful.
She could waste precious time climbing up to the hatch leading to the valve’s control panel, in the substation above… A lot of the poison would be free to spill into the bay.
Or she could gamble on the possibility that she could swing it shut from inside the pipe. She knew there weren’t supposed to be anything stopping the valve; why limit the ways in which a failsafe can be triggered? She’d only have to contend with the water pressure pushing back.
But she had trained. Her high-tech suit enhanced her in ways that surpassed normal ponies’ limitations.
She was the Sharkmare. She could do it, because failing there and then was beyond unthinkable. Lives were on the line.
In the darkness, the brighter white bulb of the access hatch came speeding towards her. She launched her grapple-tail forward, pulling herself in order to outrun the poisonous flood. Just a few seconds would help.
The hook latched onto the hatches’ handle, and she surged forward, slipping out of the muck. Deliberately overshooting the grapple, she detached it in midair so the cable would not interfere with the valve; the large metal disk standing upright in the middle of the pipe.
The Sharkmare landed a few feet beyond the disk, immediately turning around to tackle it with all her might. It moved, barely, and before she could even try again, the first trickle of the wave washed past her hooves.
Thinking fast, she activated Her Remora Suction Boots, considerably increasing her purchase on the wet steel. Putting all her earth pony strength into it, she pushed on the disk once more.
As the poisoned water came rushing past, her efforts paid off; the trickle that had turned into a shooting geyser slowly turned back into a trickle. With a final effort, she managed to seal the valve shut. Only a fraction of the poison had made it through; hopefully it would be too little to endanger lives.
And then the Sharkmare collapsed.
Maniacs assault sewage treatment facilities; police deal with the crisis, ten suspects apprehended, mastermind still at large. More details page 3-5
“Hm, it seems we made the front page, Alert. No mention of me, of course. It must be a slow news day, if the commissioner couldn’t even keep this under wraps.”
The grey mare, lounging in a comfortable chair under the morning light streaming from the wide, luxurious windows, tossed the newspaper back on the nearby reading table.
“Madam, please, I do not think you should be up and about this early after last night! Your body needs time to deal with these horrid toxins!”
A good-natured scoff followed by a sip of tea accompanied the reply. “My suit is water-tight, Alert; only a few droplets of the poison made their way to my skin through the small cuts those thugs made, so I am fine. The poison was mostly airborne and its effectiveness is greatly reduced if only exposed through contact.”
“Still, I advise you to rest, Madam. You must be bruised all over thanks to these brutes.”
Octavia Melody, billionaire entrepreneur and heiress to the Melody fortune, rose from her seat, depositing her empty teacup next to the newspaper. “You know I would love to, Alert; I’m definitely sore from that fight.” She stretched, carefully. “…But I have a board meeting at ten, a few very important calls from the city regarding a mysterious ‘gas leak’ in the sewage treatment plant for which they need more Melody Industries biohazard cleaning equipment, and a concert to attend later tonight. You know my days are very busy.”
She headed for the door. Alert watched her leave, from the corner of the room where he’d been casually dusting a few busts.
“A hero’s job is never done, Madam. Please, take care of yourself.”
Just before leaving the room, she looked back to him. “Thank you, Alert. And don’t worry, I will…”
She then left the room and the butler in it. As she walked away, she muttered under her breath, in an exaggeratedly-gravelly tone. “I’m the heavens-damned Sharkmare, after all.”
